I am a morning person – Fred, my husband of 12 years is a night owl – so, I forgo the traditional alarm clock to a shaking by our house helper in order to ensure my husband doesn’t wake up. I treasure my early mornings either alone on the porch with my steaming cup of java – or bringing my children to school and chatting in the car. My children – Missy (age 10) and Manuel (age 8) are still at that age when they like having me bring them to school.

The rest of my mornings are used very efficiently as my “office hours”. Breakfast in front of the laptop as I do all the communications work needed to run and manage a ballet company and school (Ballet Manila). Fred and I spend many a mornings on this famous porch – enclosed by glass in a house “Tara-style” in Pasay City.

My afternoons are spent dancing. Now, dancing at my age is not the rigorous 8 hour day I would spend in the studio anymore. It’s now an hour and a half of ballet class (barre, center, pirouettes and jumps) and a maximum of a two hour rehearsal afterwards. And yes, it is filled with pain, sweat and aches in your body that you never even thought a muscle existed there. I’m not complaining though. Not everyone has a job that keeps you physically fit, let’s you play different roles and exults your creativity, as well as allows you to tell a story or express yourself without saying a single word.

I have the best studio set-up in the world – going to work is a 20 second walk across our garden. In fact, I can see the main studio from our porch. Sometimes, I spend an extra hour or two in the studio teaching and coaching but am normally back home before 6 pm. No rush hour traffic! Just another 20 second walk back to our porch. Back to homework checking, dinner and chilling with my brood.

I said earlier that I am a morning person. If I don’t have a performance, I’m in bed by 9 pm. My days have three classifications – performance days, non-performance days, and vacation days. I like vacation days the most (who doesn’t?) – but some of my hardest non-performance days are the ones just after a series of vacation days so it’s a give-and-take thing.

So now you know – being a ballerina is not all the glitz and glamour that the stage disguises so cleverly. At the risk of sounding cliché – it’s a tough job, but, someone has got to do it. I’m honored to be one! I have dreamed of becoming a ballerina since I was 14 years old. Every one of my days is spent living the dream.