Resumptive Depressive

Hoo, boy...Another post that begins with an apology. I should just copy and paste the apologies from all the other times I've gone months without posting. But that would be still another insult to you, my reader. S. So, no: I will cook up another one, completely original, and heartfelt this time. Here goes:

Sorry, man.

Anyway, on to the hijinks: Q started piano lessons again today. We give him the summers off, what with travel and all (perhaps more about that later on), but then we start him up again in the fall. In the past, he's grumbled about the lessons on occasion - once, famously, he responded to a question about what he would wish for if he had but one wish. And the thing he said he'd wish for was an end to piano lessons. I kind of jumped on him for that one, if you recall - reminded him that he liked to sit and play, that he was proud of himself for what he'd accomplished, that he laughed with Ed every single time he had a lesson.

But this crisis was worse. He cried - yowlingly, sobbingly cried - when we told him it would soon be time to start the lessons again. "I hate them! I hate it!", he wailed. "You're making me waste all my time on something I don't want to do!"

We told him we would talk about it and get back to him.

In the end, a couple of things turned us toward insisting that he start up again. One is the simple fact that we know him, and that he wildly exaggerates his heartfelt emotions into great, combusting fits. He does it regularly - with physical pain, with insults from other kids, with offenses to his dignity doled out by younger siblings and pets. (Seriously. Pets.) He's a wonderfully sensitive, considerate young boy, who is very, very far from being even reasonably tough. So we have learned to read his hyperbolic suffering jags accordingly.

The second clue as to how to best handle this came last Saturday, when Janneke had to take Q to Caretaker Farm with her. Don't recall why, but he would have had to be in the house alone otherwise. (Soccer for T was involved, I think.) And the whole time he was out there with her, all he wanted to do was nothing. "Want to help me pick tomatoes?" "No." "Want to go to the pond and look for frogs?" "No." "Want to go help those guys who are weeding?" "No." Just plain-ol' laziness. Which led us to the conclusion that more leisure time is not what this particular kid needs right now.

So we decided we would say to him, "Fine. If you want to continue just with the trumpet," (a tactic he had deployed through tears days earlier), "we'll find a teacher and you'll have a lesson once a week with the teacher, in addition to your lessons at school."

Convulsions and explosive yowling. "No! I don't need that! The lessons at school are enough!"

"No, they are not, Q. You don't play the trumpet nearly as well as some of the other kids, because you do, not, practice at home. Why? Because we don't make you - you've got plenty of practicing to do for the piano. If you want to continue the trumpet, fine, but we decided long ago not to enforce practicing with that. Well, if, now, you want to replace piano with trumpet, fine - but the lessons to be learned from steady practice and improvement that you're getting from piano, will now have to come from the trumpet."

More squealing and fussing.

But at some point in here, after a couple of ugly stormings-off, we made the following points to him, in just about these words:

"You absolutely do not practice for an hour every day. It's fifteen to twenty minutes, max. Don't exaggerate. And the lesson you go to is not even an hour long, and it's once a week. Which means that four out of five days, you have from the end of school until five o'clock or five thirty to do whatever you want. That often involves soccer practice, but that's your time. You want to do that, and all your friends are there. Four days out of five, you have no obligations. And on the fifth, you lose, effectively, an hour of your two free hours. That is not very much to ask, and the fact that you act as if it were, shows us that you need to learn that it is not.

"You play your Wii every, single, day. This is very generous of us - you play it in the morning for a bit, and then often in the afternoon. You have plenty of time for goofing around.

"Today is Sunday. It's 10:30 AM. You won't have to go to bed until 9:30 - that's 11 hours. You have NO obligations during those eleven hours. The Packers are on, we're going to watch that, your friend Ethan is coming over - it's one long party for you. A lack of free time is absolutely not an issue in your life.

"All kids want to give up on things that start to seem hard. But part of growing up is learning to accept that sometimes, you have to work at something to achieve it. The fact that you're saying 'I'll keep playing the piano, just without the lessons', shows us that you haven't learned that lesson yet either. Because you won't - you've hardly played it all summer. Having a mentor and a teacher who has expectations is an excellent way to grow as a person. It's our responsibility to help you grow into a person who can do that.

"My mother let me quit piano when I whined about it enough. I was very excited not to have to practice or go to lessons. I still remember the giddiness I felt when Mom and Jayne trooped out the door to go to lessons for the first time and I got to stay home with Jim and Jess. I was so excited! You know what I did?

"I don't either. I have no memory of it. I have no idea what I did with that one little hour every week, with those twenty minutes a day. I wasted them. I got nothing at all out of them. And now I can't play the piano."

He got calmer and calmer as the discourse wore on, weaving back and forth between Janneke and me, his demeanor growing more and more free and easy.

"Fine," he said, without petulance. "OK. I'll do it."

And today's lesson? Fan, tastic. Grinning, laughing, never once complaining when I went to pick him up. It may help that the lesson is on Fridays now, and many kids are out of the Youth Center by late afternoon, off to fulfill weekend plans. But I can't tell you how great it was to watch him playing again, watch him interacting again with Ed, that wonderful man. It just made me sigh and smile and snuggle back into my chair.

Which was really uncomfortable. It's held in a practice hall, after all.

So, enough of that. Here's some visual aids.



That's Clarabelle, responding to some obscene sounds being produced by the wife and the boy. Crazy, crazy stuff.

Speaking of which, did I ever show you this:



T showing off her new room. Can't recall if I ever posted it here. If I did, hey, what's the harm in doing so again? And if I didn't, well, good. Now I have.

And finally, here's a video I made to promote the Spanish Guitar Club at my school. On "Back to School Night", it played on a loop on a TV cart in a lobby area. Thought it was a pretty elegant solution to the simple impossibility of being up in my classroom, greeting parents, and downstairs manning the guitar club table. So there was no guitar club table - there was simply this, over and over:



OK, officially punchy. G'night, Grandma...