piano lessons

Yesterday we went to the studio and signed Mira up for piano lessons. She is 61/2 the "perfect age to begin" as told to us by Matt her teacher. Matt is young with longish blond hair, he is soft spoken and seems kind, a piano teacher.

Mira is also in Brownies and plays soccer. She walks to school everyday and has been asking to ride her bike there. She comes home from school, has a snack, and, if she doesn't have an activity, plays with one of her friends or her brother and does her homework. At 6:00 pm or so her dad comes home from work, she eats dinner, plays a bit more or has a bath, reads a book with her mom, and goes to bed. Mira's life is utterly normal. For me this is a stunning achievement. Normal as the pinnacle of good. The exact opposite of me.

Nothing for me was ever normal. The school I went to was the Jewish school. It wasn't in the neighborhood and no one had ever heard of it. We called our teachers by their first names and we had "levels" rather than grades. I learned about what normal school was from reading the Ramona books. Is it a coincidence that the school Beverly Cleary based her series on is the actual school that Mira attends?

After school I came home and watched tv or read. Everyday. The children that I read about took piano lessons. They often hated them and were coerced into them by their parents. They also played with kids in the neighborhood, fought with their brothers and sisters, played sports, or were Brownies. Sometimes the parents in the book were divorced and the kid would visit their dad on the weekends. I liked these books the best. They made me feel a tiny bit normal. Mostly I read about what I wished my life was like.

Although I had two brothers and a sister I had no one to play with or fight with when I got home from school. They were so much older than me. So this was not normal. It's normal to have brothers and sisters your own age or to be an only child but what I had was strange. Our last name was strange, hard to spell, hard to pronounce, and sounded way too much like grow fart. It can be normal to have a mother who works or one who is divorced but to have one who is both meant that you could never participate in after school activities and this was not normal. So, no, I don't know how to play piano or any other instrument, and I've never been a girl scout or played a sport.

It is definitely not normal to have a dad who is a rabbi. Especially one who lives in Texas or California or Ohio. He had two more kids who are brother and sister to each other but only slightly to me. I never found any books where things were as so not normal as my life. I knew that if only every single circumstance in my life weren't turned to the strange side I would be okay. If I lived in the Ramona books or on the Brady Bunch I would have been fine.

But I wasn't. I got sick a lot and stopped doing my homework. I hid from the world. It's exhausting trying to explain why you are so not normal so I stopped trying. I read. I watched tv. If I spent all of my time with the Bradys and the Quimby surely eventually I'd be absorbed by them. If I hid long enough surely I would disappear and reappear the way I should have been. Totally normal.

Mom wanted me to be normal. Her life was about normalcy. She was appalled at who I was. To her there was nothing appealing about difference. Yet she couldn't create for me what I am trying to create for Mira and so she had me instead. I don't think she knew really how much I wanted to be what she wanted me to be. Neither of us knew how to get me there.

Eventually I emerged from my world of books. Normal or not I chose to live the life I had. It was because in the end their love was stronger than the life they created for me. I could live in this existence because they loved me, both of them did. They loved me when I couldn't get up. Their love caused me to get up.

I know of course now that there are all kinds of normal and while my life wasn't a typical story it wasn't as vastly different as it felt. But normal feels like a gift. It's extraordinary. Mira is Mira but she is also my child and someday she may want to run away. I know my love and Jeff's is strong enough to bring her back. But I hope she won't have to go.