Trumpet Tears

I’ve always told my children that they should find balance between sports and the arts.  I thought they should play an instrument.  And they did.  Until they told me they didn’t want to any more.  I forced it for a while, but even I knew that resuscitating a silenced piano with forced lessons helps no one; nurturing and encouraging can quickly become bribing and intimidating. 
 

Throughout all of the music lessons, I temporarily enjoyed the sounds of banging drums, fumbling piano keys, even the nasally whine of the recorders until finally, I was rewarded with the melancholy sound of my son’s trumpet. 

When my son fell in love with the French horn at a concert, I was thrilled.  He carried that passion for years, playing the trumpet first, to build up to the complexity of the French horn.  And he was a decent player.  I imagined him playing Taps one day. 

 

Then the inevitable happened.  His friends dropped out, one by one.  The music became more difficult.  He got too hungry on the band bus after school.  He stopped practicing.  Then one day, he forgot the lesson altogether.  So did I.

We tried a variety of approaches (bribes).  Ok you can have a donut when you go to band.   You can stay up to watch that show if you practice for 20 minutes.  If I don’t hear that trumpet, you’re not going to hear that iPod!  And then finally, slowly, I came to my senses, remembering that you can’t extort passion from someone.  Nor should you.  A parent’s job is to lead the baby horse to water, not to dunk its head in it.

I’m not sure why I was slightly tearful when we finally told him he could quit playing trumpet.  True, I was mourning his childhood a bit, witnessing perhaps the last musical instrument to come bellowing through our house.  But was I also watching him say goodbye to his passion simply because it became too difficult?  Had I sent my son the wrong message by letting him quit?   Did we teach him enough about the value of practice and discipline? 

 

Then I thought of my son, this child who stays out in the backyard catching pop flies until well past dark,   the same boy who clears away snow in the driveway, so he can practice his foul shots.  I’ve seen him scramble out of bed early on Saturday morning to catch his dad heading to the field with the dog, in the hopes that if he brings his bat and glove, he might get in some hitting or pitching practice, this kid who goes to basketball games just to take shots on the empty nets on the other side of the gym. 

My son didn’t get the wrong message about quitting.  And he didn’t miss the lesson on the value of practice and discipline.

When he set down his trumpet, this boy wasn’t saying goodbye to his passion; he was making room for it.