From a Long Line of Lunatics

I never wanted or needed to be special, but my mother could not bear the thought of having an average child. No. I had to be special. I had to be some kind of genius or a prodigy or a virtuoso or SOMETHING, to please her. It started when I was about 4. The lessons. Piano lessons because, as she told me, she wanted piano lessons and her parents couldn't afford to give her lessons. It didn't matter that at 4 years old I didn't actually want to play the piano (and I kept right on not wanting to play the piano, but taking lessons, until I was 14). I also started ballet lessons, singing lessons, painting lessons, gymnastics lessons, all at the age of 4. I even auditioned for a play (well, my mother plopped me on a stage and I was told what to sing) at the age of 4. I was tested for our school district's "gifted and talented" program at age 4.

I failed early on at gymnastics, ballet, singing (I didn't get the part in the play), painting. The gifted and talented program told my mother that while I had a very high IQ, I was too talkative & they thought I'd distract the other baby geniuses, so they didn't accept me into their program. But my mother was determined her child would be talented, special in some way. If her child was special, well then that made her special by association. So like those crazy bitches on "Dance Moms", she was determined to turn me into a piano prodigy (partly because she'd always wanted to play herself, and partly because the piano teacher was the only one who didn't refuse to have me as a student after the first few lessons).

So I learned how to read music and how to sit up straight. The piano teacher (who wore the worst of wigs) would have these yearly recitals I had zero desire to participate in, but my mother would drag my father and my grandfather to see me perform like a trained monkey. And I had zero talent for the piano. What's more, I genuinely disliked having to go for lessons three times a week (for an hour each time) when the other kids got to go to the park. "Hanging out in the park won't get you anywhere in life," my mother would say, as though spending three hours a week in the home of a crazy old bat who put her wig on cockeyed was going to make me ruler of the universe. By the time I was in high school, I had lessons with the old bat three times a wek, and on Saturdays I had an all-day lesson (from 8 am to 4 pm) with the old bat's grown daughter, who played professionally for the New York Philharmonic.

And I hated it. I couldn't hang out with friends (and by "hang out with friends" I mean drink my face off and whore around) on Friday nights because I had to be up at 6 to be at my lesson for 8 (and not even god herself could help me if I showed up hungover). Perhaps the fact that my mother pushed me so vigourously into something I hated so much is why that was one of the rare occasions in my life when I told her "no". About halfway through my freshman year in high school I started saying I didn't wanna take lessons anymore, that I was never going to play professionally and so what was the point. Mommy wouldn't take no for an answer, so I asked the old bat and her very dignified daughter who played for the New York Philharmonic if they could get me the sheet music to Nirvana's Come As You Are. They were both of the mindset that no good musio was written after the 17th century and were HORRIFIED that I wanted to play modern music. So they sat my mother down and explained I wasn't taking them seriously, didn't want to play serious music, and that it would be a waste of my grandfather's money to send me for any more lessons with them. But hey, after only ten short years of piano lessons, I learned how to manipulate three adults (the old bat, her daughter, and my own mother) into letting me stop taking the lessons. But unfortunately, a talent for manipulating people isn't the kind of talent my mother wanted me to develop.

Dettagli