Parenting FAIL

We all have our moments, or so I have heard. I had one the other day, and it wasn't pretty.

My beautiful girl, my Abigail, who I love possibly more than any other human on the planet (talk to me about Will when he is older and easier to love! Only joking bubba, I love you too) is almost too easy to parent. She is amendable to suggestion, kind, considerate, does a minimum of whining and is generally easy to please. Sometimes I worry about HOW easy to please, or rather EAGER to please, but her school teachers assure me she is very capable of standing up for herself.

My Abigail is a lot like me. So much so that sometimes I forget that in fact she is NOT me. This became very apparent when I started teaching her violin last year.

At first we were fine. We both had fun, I was impressed how fast she learned, she was keen and ready to go. After she learned the basics though it started to get a little more... fraught. Lately we have had conflict over practicing violin, something she has never had trouble with before. And I pushed back, becoming more demanding, correcting every mistake and insisting she repeat the incorrect bars over and over again. I became short - she became whiny. In the end I lost it, yelled at her (which I very rarely do) and sent her crying to her room.

I asked that oh so rhetorical parental question, "Do you even WANT to learn violin?" to which she answered "... what do YOU want?".

And I missed it.

"I want you to learn!" I sputtered. "But if you're not going to take it seriously I don't know why I bother!".

I am ashamed.

Perhaps it is because I have seen friends go through this with their children that I was able to pull myself together within a few minutes. I apologised, and explained to my love that although I would love for her to play and enjoy violin like I do, that I was not making it fun for her and that that wasn't fair on either of us. This was brought into stark relief by the fact that the mother of the student I had taught just that afternoon had expressed to me how much her daughter enjoyed her lessons because I never got cross and always made it a positive experience for her daughter. Whoops.

We decided that we would switch to piano for a while, and then maybe next year we would look at finding a different violin teacher for her because Mummy expects her to be perfect. Abby thought this was hilarious - "But nobody's perfect Mummy!". Yes darling, that's the point.

She had a piano lesson this afternoon. It was great. She asked to do violin tomorrow.

We'll see.