Bach and Perseverance

For as long as I have know them, my children have shown no interest whatsoever in me playing the piano.  When they were very little they would wail ‘stop mummy’ or ‘let me play, mummy’, so I quickly gave up on my romanticised view of musical motherhood where I would play Bach as they played on the floor beside me.  But recently something has changed.  The last two evenings after homework is done, they have actually ASKED me to play for them.  ‘Play the Waltz’, ‘Play the fast one’, ‘Play the one you played when you were a little girl.’  This last request was the reason I climbed up to the attic today to seek out my box full of old piano music and find my copy of The Children’s Bach.  This particular collection of piano pieces has an almost mythical status among those of us who learnt the piano as children.  Helen Garner chose to use the title for her 1984 Novella.  I remember being particularly moved when, at a musical soirée, Anna Goldsworthy played a piece, probably a Minuet, from The Children’s Bach and read extracts from her memoir Piano Lessons because it took me straight back to my early years learning the piano.  When I found my copy of The Children’s Bach today I was similarly transported back to early piano lessons.  My copy is dog-eared, faded, sellotaped, with my name on the front cover in my piano teacher’s familiar handwriting.  I was filled with love for this music and fond memories of my piano teacher, Mrs Spratt, who was in many ways my musical mother, someone who understood me very well.  The reason I went up into the attic to extract this particular book was an ongoing ‘discussion’ (argument) I am having with my older daughter about the importance of perseverance.  She is learning the piano, and like every 7 year old, is not overly interested in practising, and being a clever 7 year old who often finds things easy, she is struggling with the realisation that learning a new piece is DIFFICULT.  Having tried the Robert the Bruce and the spider story (“if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”) without much traction, I told her how I had struggled with a particular piano piece when I was little bit older than her; ‘A Little Air’, from The Children’s Bach.  I clearly remember how frustrated I was, how the piece tripped me up and just didn’t make sense and that it nearly made me give up the whole endeavour.  But after a stern word from my piano teacher and probably my mother too, I knuckled down and played it over and over and over again until I got it.  I also remember the fantastic sense of satisfaction and pride in my achievement when I could finally play the piece from beginning to end.  I told my daughter all of this.  And then she wanted to hear the piece.  I will play it for her and her sister tonight, along with a waltz and a fast piece and maybe a Bach Prelude.  And I hope my story of the ‘tricky piano piece’ will stay with her every time she starts a new piece and meets that wall of frustration.  Perseverance, along with resilience, are perhaps some of the most important lessons I hope to teach our children.

the things we keep

Today I went through some of my mothers papers that had been sitting in bags and boxes in our bedroom for well over a year.  My mother died nearly 18 months ago and I have been putting off this task, knowing that it would be difficult.  But today I went through the various bundles of photos, old and more recent, my mother’s nursing certificates and letters of reference, a collection of cheque book stubs with balances brought forward and all cheques accounted for. My mother was a very organised and orderly person.  There were the mother’s day cards I had made, the letters my father had written to her when she was on trips home to the UK.  And the letters from my Grandfather to her, all signed ‘love from Daddy’.  There was an old chocolate box full of cards to my parents congratulating them on my birth – quite an event as my mother was 40 when I was born and I was her only child.  I remember going through this box of cards on may occasions when I was a child, enjoying all the pictures of bears and baby girls and pink ribbons.  Many of these things made me cry, as I expected they would.  My mother is so present in all of these things – it makes her absence now all the more painful to me. 

There were also many things that weren’t there that made me wonder why.  There were no letters from her mother, who died suddenly within a year or so of Mum moving to Australia.  I know they were very close so it seems strange that there are no letters from her, or indeed any letters before about 1977.  Although I haven’t been through all the boxes of Mum’s things yet, I don’t remember seeing any letters from her sisters in the UK, with whom she corresponded on a reasonably regular basis.  I have a feeling that my mother disposed of much of her correspondence.  I can imagine her having one of her ‘clean outs’ which could often be quite ruthless and unsentimental.  My mother was the opposite of a hoarder – she regularly shed things.  And seemingly letters were amongst the things that she did not deem worth keeping.  I’m not sure that they contained terrible family secrets that she didn’t want me to find out – I think she just felt no compulsion to hold onto the past.   I have found my mother’s lack of sentimentality in some instances quite disconcerting.  All through my childhood and into my adult life my mother held onto a neatly folded tissue containing my baby teeth.  I can remember where she kept it in her dressing table – it was always there.  After she died and I had to pack up her things, there was no sign of the baby teeth.  I can’t imagine why she would have disposed of them after all this time.  She never asked me if I wanted them.   Another example was an old reel – to reel tape recorder with a recording of me, aged 3, talking about a ‘koala bear’ eating porridge.  A few years ago I got the recording digitised as we were worried the tape might deteriorate.  I returned the tape to my mother and then some time after that she disposed of the tape machine and the tape reels.

So it was all the more strange going through her papers to come across a small envelope containing an RSVP to her 9^th birthday party from a little girl called Winnie.  I’d never seen this note before, I have no idea who Winnie was, or why this small envelope and its contents has survived for nearly 80 years when so many other seemingly significant things have gone by the wayside.  Perhaps it had survived in my Grandfather’s papers (he definitely WAS a hoarder) and my mother came across it when she was going through his things after his death.  I will ask my aunty if she remembers a little girl called Winnie but as she would have only been 7 years old at the time, she may not . 

And going through my mothers things leads me to reflect on how I deal with the dilemma of what to keep and what to shed as I move through life, accumulating things.  We have boxes full of children’s art works and school books and little things they have made – and our girls are still young.  There are years ahead of accumulating and shedding of things not regarded as important enough to keep.

I still have a collection of my own school books and art – a collection that has been pruned over the years but much of it survives.  I wonder how I will deal with the hard choices of what to keep and what to discard and what I will leave for our children.  

A particular kind of aloneness

My six year old daughter was singing in the kitchen today and I told her what a good singer she was.  She asked “Did you sing as well as me when you were six?” And the answer is, I don’t know, and I no longer have anyone to ask.

I’m not sure whether you can really refer to yourself as becoming an ‘orphan’ once you are a grown up.   I’m very grown up, almost middle-aged by some people’s reckoning, but I still feel the particular impact of knowing that both my parents are now dead.  Although I have a half brother and sister from my father’s first marriage, they are a generation older than me and I did not live with them when I was growing up – I grew up as an only child.  And that is what makes me feel this newly conferred ‘orphanhood’ more acutely.  In a way I feel as though I have been severed from my childhood.  If I can’t remember something that happened when I was four, now there is no one else who can.  I relied on my mother’s recollections of my childhood, particularly for the years before about the age of 4.  Now that she is gone there is no longer a reliable witness to my childhood.  I know this comes to all of us but I think having young children makes me feel this absence more keenly.  What was I like at 4?  Is my 4 year-old similar or different to me at the same age?  If my 6 year old pulls a certain face, there is no longer any one to say - “you look just like your mother when she was your age”.  I’m not going to wallow in self-pity about my ‘orphanhood’ because in the scheme of things it is really not so significant. We all lose our parents eventually - some of us sooner than others.  At least I had one parent who lived to see me a happy adult and mother of my own children. But still, I think this particular type of aloneness will take a bit of getting used to.