Youngest is lovingly referred to by her grandparents as “a force of nature.” She is exuberant, strong, passionate; she is a joyful handful. I started her on violin with not a small amount of trepidation because I could imagine the sorts of power struggles we would have over it. But she saw her sister playing, and she loves music, and—believe me—I had to teach her.
Now, I am a believer in parental authority, but she is not completely convinced. And our daily practice session is very often centered on who, exactly, is in charge. Because she gets excited, and she has ideas, and she is passionate, and she wants to run with whatever pops into her head. She also really, truly, wants to play violin, however, and the only way she’s going to learn that is by listening. To me.
We are making progress. We almost always manage to get down to business, finally, and I can see that our work is paying off. I think she can, too. And we have some great philosophical conversations about it in the car after dropping her brother and sister off at Taekwon-do. The other day we were driving along, talking about violin and how well she was doing and I said, “Do you see how awesome it is when you listen to Mommy? You do so well when you do what I say!” And she countered with, “Well…it’s not very awesome…but it’s awesome.” I’ll take that as an encouraging sign. And from now on, I’m shooting for very awesome.
