When I was eleven, I lived in a small Hungarian town for a year. Since I played violin, and wanted to take lessons, I ended up in the town’s music school. Unfortunately for me, that meant that in addition to taking violin lessons, I had to take Szolfezs (music theory) classes twice a week and participate in dances for the music school’s occasional performances in the Culture House.

One such performance was the Mother’s Day Concert, in which I played Weber’s Country Dance on my violin as well as a few pieces with Zénekör (the orchestra my violin teacher had me play in). I also had to dance with boys (eek!) to a Hungarian version of the song “Cradle”, for which I limped along like a “hurt” ankle, looking like an idiot.

After my ankle theatrics (which my dad caught on video, much to my embarrassment), I had another dance to perform in—

A dance with baby dolls.

We had been preparing this dance for a couple months. It was ridiculous in the notion, and I think the first time I heard I would be doing this I thought it was a joke. All the girls in my Szolfezs class would be dancing with our baby dolls for Mother’s Day, a gesture that sent my parents into hysterics and caused everyone nearby to glare at them.

The actual dance went okay. I mean, my ankle was still “hurting” so I looked pathetic, but everyone else looked completely genuine as they lifted their babies up into the air like Simba, showing them off for the world to see. I actually preferred this dance to the other one, because I hated dancing with boys. After all, my peers taught me to believe that boys were gross and were, most definitely, A Different Species.

This being said, the dance forced me to realize just how much gender roles were ingrained in society. While we did our dance with baby dolls, the boys did a dance with sticks. It was almost as if I was receiving direct training to be a nurturing, caring mother that, although wonderful, was never really able to accomplish much outside of motherhood.

We were the mothers. The boys were the laborers. Those were the roles of the dances, and although they were just dances, they still put me into a little female-box filled with expectations of wifehood.

Hungary had very defined gender roles—ones that were less flexible than that of the United States. I never met a woman in the town I lived in that had a job that wasn’t traditionally feminine, and even then, a lot of women wouldn’t have worked at all if not for the state of the economy. Women were judged if they were single, and the majority of women in the town I lived in were mothers. They cooked, they cleaned, they took their kids to their extracurricular activities—I barely saw fathers at all when I was at school. It became clear that the expectation of Hungarian women was to find a man who could provide, and then start a family. It was an ever-repeating cycle, one that carried over in this baby dance.

In this day of celebration for all the mothers in the town, we danced on stage with babies of our own—our futures. Our destinies. We were to become mothers like our mothers, and then our children would become mothers like us. There was no expectation of a career. No expectation of becoming just as successful as the boys with their sticks.

It was the first time where I really felt the consequences of being a woman—the low, narrow expectations and opposition to transcending them.

When asked in kindergarten what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be a mama. I loved my mom, of course, and looked up to her, which was probably the immediate reason for the way I responded. But looking back, I think that I was getting signals—from the people I met, the shows I watched, even the things I did for fun—all that was telling me that I was expected to grow up, get married, and have children. And although that expectation isn’t exactly limited just to women, it weighs heavier upon us, because we are the ones that have to do the childbearing.

Though no one I care about expects me to adhere to traditional gender roles, I can feel pressures from all around me telling me to be quiet, to be nice, to let the men take center stage. I see fiction where the female characters are defined by the men they fall in love with in a single stare. I’ve gotten judgmental comments from people who think I should have a boyfriend “to get experience”.

But I don’t need this. I don’t need to be devalued into something that only exists to embrace the traditional family values we learned about in AP United States History. I love mothers. I love them and I appreciate them so much, no matter how they reflect their gender, but I don’t want to be just a mother. I want to do better and greater things with my life, things that aren’t defined by society’s expectations.

I don’t want to spend my time dancing with babies.