Long-Awaited Absolution

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say.

This one covers at least that many for me.

See, this is the first time Silas has played the piano in almost four months. He's first and foremost a violinist, quite talented for seven years old, if I do say so myself. But he's also a gifted musician in general. I've shared his compositions on Facebook in the past. He taught himself to read music and understands musical patterns intuitively. For most of 2019, he'd been spending hours at the piano, figuring out music. It was amazing.

Recent violin recital.

But one evening four months ago, life was crazy. This is not an extraordinary event. I have six children. The boys are not quiet, especially right after dinner when they run laps around the first floor and at least one of them is playing the piano. Four months ago, Tessa was still failing to thrive, and I was spending some eight hours a day on the couch or in the rocking chair, nursing and pumping and nursing and pumping. She was sleeping at night but I was setting alarms to get up and pump. I'd accumulated three months of acute stress and exhaustion.

On this particular evening, Silas was experimenting with playing Levi's Chopin prelude with his hands in two different keys. It was very loud and very discordant, and it was background music to the lap-running and hungry-baby crying. So I know that no one will fault me when I admit:

I lost it.

I yelled at him to stop. 

I told him that if he couldn't play in the right key, then he couldn't play at all.

I let him feel the full extent of my exasperation as I begged him to let me show him where to put his left hand so that at least it would sound good. 

I can't even type that without cringing.

Because Silas, my goofy middle-child Silas, is also my most sensitive boy. It was Silas, at the tender age of three, who struggled the most when we moved to Minnesota -- and who was only calmed down by watching Yo-Yo Ma play his cello on a decades-old episode of Mr. Rogers. It's Silas who I have found, multiple times at multiple playgrounds, silently weeping because he needed help getting down a slide or up a ladder but doesn't know how to ask for help. 

And so he stopped playing the piano. Not for that night, which was all I wanted in the moment, but completely. It was weeks before I even noticed, and then I asked: hey, why don't you play the piano anymore? 

He answered: you said I couldn't if I couldn't do it right.

I apologized. I told him I was wrong. I explained "stress." I affirmed everything about him. I told him how much I missed his music. I said it over, and over, and over again. Weekly. Sometimes daily. He'd shrug and walk away. 

In the meantime, Silas has been battling a crippling perfectionist anxiety. His once-joyful violin lessons became fraught with "if I can't do it right, then I shouldn't play at all." I know, in my head, that I cannot point to one angry-mom moment as the sole source of his perfectionism. Gifted kids come with anxieties, and this one was rearing its head before I lost my temper. But oh, to think that I reinforced his self-doubt with my careless words! That he gave up something he loved because his mom criticized it! It has been brutal on my soul. 

Three days ago, as he walked past the piano, he reached out a plunked a few notes, and it was like the first blooms of spring. I said nothing, but held my breath and prayed. 

Two days ago, he strode into the living room and announced, "I think I remember how to play the piano again." I dared to hope.

Yesterday morning, I found him and Levi working through Levi's Haydn piece together, and my heart exploded.

So that picture, the one at the top, with its thousand words. It screams at me of failure, and the importance of being slow to speak, and how awful it feels to violate your child's trust. It speaks of the tenderness of children's souls, and how desperately they value our opinions, and how long it takes to repair wounds. And it whispers truth: that grace is resilient, and forgiveness is real, and love covers all.