What opportunities are we taking away from them when we decide which ones to give?

“I think we’re interpreting the word beginner differently,” Saoirse’s at the sink in my office, rinsing out her travel mug and lunch container.  I’m trying to send out some invoices before calling it quits for the day.  “I thought beginner meant you didn’t need to have experience.  Apparently they think beginner means you’ve already had four years of tap lessons.  And headshots.  You’re supposed to have headshots.”

I guffaw loudly and spin away from my desk to look at her.  I am in awe how Saoirse’s nearly six foot frame becomes invisible in these theater classes, where she then employs that superpower to take in every subtlety with razor intelligence, even if it’s only to amuse me with her stories and observations when she gets home.  

She’s signed on with Proctors Theater in Schenectady, an hour away, to take a one week audition prep class; after which she’ll be paying fees to audition and join the cast for their summer production of Thoroughly Modern Millie.  Apparently tap dancing figures heavily into all of this. 

I think her observations are pretty funny, and I’m ready to join her for a laugh.  She offers up a small chortle in camaraderie, and I notice that the corners of her eyes are wet.  Something’s not right.  Many a truth is said in jest.

I launch from my desk and catch her in my arms.  Invoices can go out another day.  I guide her to the couch and pull her close.  Bob settles into the easy chair beside us.  We wait for the tears to come.

And they do.  

“Tell us what happened,” I rub her back and wait for words.  They are slow to come.  

She brings them out with another chortle.  “It’s just that, you were too good a mom,” she offers a wan smile.  “You didn’t make me go to dance classes.”

“Not for want of trying!” I counter in my defense.  When she was two, we signed up for Mommy and Me dance classes.  I was pregnant for Ula, but determined to give my little girl the right start in the world.  I remember watching Saoirse walk up to the other little kids and attempt to make friends.  Even then she was the tallest kid in the class.  Even then, in spite of her kind words, they pretended not to see her.  After a few weeks, claiming my enormous belly made the class too difficult, we withdrew.  After Ula’s birth, I decided to help Saoirse embrace our Irish heritage, and I enrolled her in Irish Step Dancing forty minutes away.  She dawdled and dragged her feet any time we had an activity that required us to leave the house, and this was no exception.  But I bought into the belief that the early start was the right start.  

There, she embraced the music and spun around on the floor and scandalously spread out her arms in joy….While the other children diligently kept their hands at their sides and executed meticulous footwork.  I was given a CD to take home and watch to learn the step sequences.  Then I was supposed to teach her.  The CD got lost under a stack of papers.  The days between classes were too jammed with farm, feasting and forests for us to stand in front of a computer monitor to learn steps.  I tried to coax Saoirse to the screen a few times to learn.  She refused.  When it became clear we weren’t practicing daily,  the other mothers stopped speaking to me.  Saoirse never made any friends there, either.  They generously endured her participation in the recital, even though we never memorized the dances.  While the other girls pranced in tidy circles, Saoirse moved to center stage and picked her nose while she gazed out at the audience.  When they formed the Irish version of a kick line, Saoirse discovered there were mirrors on the back wall of the stage.  She turned her back to the audience, gazed at the mirror and spun in circles, arms once more spread wide, drinking in the music with her entire body, admiring her dress in the mirror as she turned.  

That was pretty much the end of my Tiger Mother/Snowplow Mother/Helicopter Mother attempts.  

But now there is a sixteen-year-old girl wrapped in my arms.  And she’s on the cusp of finishing high school, and society expects her to have some kind of plan for her life.  She loves being part of the local community theater project, so she has pointed her compass in that direction.  She’s paying for this auditioning class with her own funds.  

She comes back with homework to find songs to sing.  When she brings them in to the class, she learns she’s chosen the wrong songs.  She leaves her hiking boots home and brings a pair of street shoes from Goodwill, and finds in the dance class that she owns the wrong shoes. She is supposed to sit up tonight, memorize all the dance steps, and write a resume of her theater experiences.  She needs us to come up with a headshot. She finds the very idea laughable.  

“I just want to hang out with you and Dad,” she leans back into me.  “I’ve had enough for today.”

And I wonder if I made a mistake 13 years ago when I stopped making her go to dance lessons.  I made a decision that if my kids weren’t racing to the car to participate in an activity, we weren’t doing it.  She raced to my sewing machine, and so I taught her to use it.  Now she knows the thing better than I do.  She raced to the kitchen and very quickly showed herself to be a better pastry chef than her mother.  She races off to community theater rehearsals, devoted to the cast, even if she just plays a part in the ensemble.  She hoists a backpack on her shoulders and treks off into the mountains with us at the drop of a hat.  She pulls herself out of bed at 3am every Saturday and insists on coming down to the cafe with me.  She rejoices in a roast chicken dinner, admires a good gravy, and takes her coffee black so that she can taste it unadulterated.  

But when she’s tired, she goes to bed.  I’ve always let her. And she never wanted to stay up late learning dance steps.  I never made her.  And she doesn’t like to miss evenings by the fire, especially when we watch Netflix on a pull-out movie screen. 

My child has this entitled view of the world that the drive to work and play is governed by passion, rest, meals and family.  I haven’t taught her about the conventional sacrifices, about working after dark, eating fast food from a bag instead of sitting down for dinner, and about all the extracurriculars that other moms schedule around the dinner hour.  

I say that I didn’t do it because she didn’t like it.  But in truth, I didn’t do it because they made me a terrible mom.  Our lives were governed by the clock, and our evenings would have been decided by an instructor’s assignments….And I would have been the enforcer. 

But if we’d done that, she would be fitting in this week.  She would be able to Shuffle Off to Buffalo, rather than feeling like the buffalo.  She’d be belting out her solos, rattling off her monologues, and she’d have a proper headshot.  And she’d have a sense of direction.

But she didn’t have passion when she was little, and I didn’t drive it into her.  I did the farm, I cooked and wrote, and I worked my day so that I could teach my kids at home.   And that, I see here on this couch, may have deprived her of the opportunities that would define her life. Instead of giving her all the best opportunities, I chose the lifestyle that made me the best parent.

She isn’t angry with me in this moment.  But I am questioning myself.  Should I have pushed harder?  Let her know that the rest of the world works after dark?  Driven her to more lessons?  

Have Bob and I shut her out of opportunities by our own choices to live the good life?

Maybe so.  But in lieu of singing and dance lessons, we’ve given her a different set of opportunities.  They were the ones that came parceled with our own unique parenting choices.  I have to let myself off the hook on this.  She chose to be born to us, I tell myself.  I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the life I wanted to pre-suppose a life my child may want.  That would have made me an unhappy mom.  And through it all, I’ve been a pretty happy mom.  

She can work to overcome this if she chooses to.  I tell her so.  But she will have to make sacrifices.  She will have to go to the other side of the house to rehearse.  She’ll have to find a dance instructor and pay for the lessons.  She will have to stop lounging beside the fire with her family and cloister herself away to practice, practice, practice.  

I tell her this.  I tell her that, when a passion is truly there, these things happen without a second thought.  I point out how I rise at 3am to write without the assistance of an alarm clock.   I point out the hours we all invest in the cafe without noticing the clock.  We are not incapable of hard work.  We are incapable of hard work stripped of passion.  

I know there are dreams inside her for which she will make the same sacrifices.  I’ve seen her make them.  But she hasn’t identified them yet.  And it isn’t my place to dictate them. 

She works on her resume, then goes to bed without practicing her music or dance steps.  But she and Bob  dig out a recent photo of her, snapped while out on a walk, and crop it into a headshot.  That part, at least, is done.  She will not go in tomorrow empty-handed. 

But she doesn’t go in the next day.  In the night, she starts to burn with a fever.  She burns with it for four days, and is unable to return to her class.  

Yesterday, she emerged from the torpor hungry.  She stood at the kitchen counter, layering butter between slices of French toast while she carefully warmed syrup on the stove.  “You know,” she says as she licks the tip of her fingers.  “I’ve gone in for these theater workshops, and each time, I realize that I don’t know as much as the other kids.  And I didn’t know to do what everyone else knew to do.  And I shrug my shoulders and make the best of it.  I say ‘Oh well.  This’ll be a great learning opportunity.’ And I do it again.  And again.  And again.  But I’m thinking, it’s always the same learning opportunity.  When am I going to actually learn?”  She tells me she has decided not to audition for a role in Thoroughly Modern Millie.

She is playing a role for a community play at the beginning of summer.  She’s planning to audition for the fall community theater production. Between those, we make plans for helping take care of Lark, Kate’s new baby, and for doing a backpacking trip on the Northville Lake Placid Trail, and for a family vacation to Ireland.  Then our conversation turns to the afternoon, to her plans to make the DeTrempe for this Saturday’s croissants, and to practice parallel parking.  

She doesn’t have it all mapped out.  She’s definitely not ready to hire a photographer for headshots.  She doesn’t know what lights her with a passionate fire, nor what will be her life goals.  But I see a lot of joyful sparks.  And I think, just keep watching those, kiddo,  and see what ignites.

Outro:

This podcast happens w the support of my patrons on Patreon.   And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Matt Daynard And  Roseanna DeMaria. 

Special Additional message:

Folks!  Spring is right around the corner!  If you’re planning a trip to the farm and you want to see some seriously cute critters, lambing season will be happening from April 21 thru early May.  You can book into the Airbnb or just drive out for SapBushSaturday and request a tour.  

Also! It’s time to place your orders for monthly fresh chickens, next winter’s pork & lamb shares, and our new monthly mixed meat shares, designed for folks who appreciate whole animal feasting and savings, but who are short on freezer space.  This will be a monthly combo pack featuring cuts from our grassfed beef & lamb, pastured pork and poultry, as well as bone broth and our frozen stews.  Monthly mixed meat shares will be $120 each; $30 savings off of retail prices. 

In order to get the lowest prices of the season, we need your orders by March 17.  After that, prices will go up.  So don’t dally! 

You can find the online order form at the top of the home page of TheRadicalHomemaker.net or sapbush.com; and you can find our Airbnb booking details there, too.