Like I Have Time For This?

So, about a year and a half ago, I was hanging out with a homeschooling friend of mine, and we got to talking about stuff we were thinking about doing for the kids. And I mentioned to her (me being a poet and all) that I was thinking about maybe starting up a poetry appreciation tea party kind of thing, and she (being an amateur pianist) said she’d been thinking about starting a music recital thing at her house, and then (WHOOPS!) her chocolate got into my peanut butter and the next thing you knew, we’d accidentally created this little arts appreciation program for homeschool kids in our area. We named it “Afternoon with the Arts” and held it once a month at her house, because her house was a hell of a lot bigger than mine. So, once a month, we’d post to one of the local homeschool groups near here, asking people to sign up for this thing, and before long, it became this Incredibly Popular Event. Practically everyone wanted in.

At first, it was really cool. Kids brought their musical instruments they were studying. Kids brought their artwork. They read poems and stories. Some danced. Some of the preschool set would get up there and do somewhat odd things that weren’t exactly related to the “ARTS”, but they were preschoolers, so we didn’t worry about it. We didn’t expect prodigies. And if they wanted to get up there and talk about firemen for 2 minutes, we’d just applaud and move on to the next act.

After a year or so of this, things began to deteriorate. It started with this one mom. (There’s always that ONE, isn’t there?) She’d been bringing her 3 kids since the beginning, and her youngest was only 3 years old, and he always liked to get up there and dance to Michael Jackson. And again, since he was only 3, we didn’t expect him to do a great job, although he actually had a pretty decent moonwalk going there. And since dance is part of the Arts, we figured he was well within the scope of the program, so no big deal, right? Well… he got so much applause for his routine that his older brother and sister wanted IN. So the 3 kids started doing something called ROCK BAND.

ROCK BAND was this act in which the 3 kids turned on some Hannah Montana song and bopped around the room for a few minutes, sort of lip-syncing and playing air guitar to the music while the 3-year-old danced his dance. For the first couple of ROCK BAND acts, we applauded politely and sort of shrugged. We figured it would eventually stop and the kids would go back to something else. Something that they were actually performing. We figured their mom would tell them: okay, that was fun, but remember, this is supposed to be a program where you show YOUR TALENT. Not just futz around up there.

But, noooooooooooooo….

ROCK BAND began to escalate. Another little boy (about 8 years old maybe) decided he wanted to do something like that too. So at the next opportunity, he got up there, put on a rapper CD, slung a KB Toys plastic guitar around his neck and mumbled along to the music. He called it HIP HOP. Next thing you knew, my kids wanted to do a ROCK BAND. And so did my co-creator’s kids. Everyone wanted to do ROCK BAND or HIP HOP. Because, let’s face it: you sound so much cooler that way, and no one can tell if you mess up.

I looked into the future of Afternoon with the Arts and saw endless hours filled with watching kids lip sync (badly) while playing air guitar and imaginary drums. And I didn’t want any part of it anymore. But, for a while I just kept my mouth shut. Who wants to be the kill-joy mom who brings ROCK BAND to a screeching halt and makes them go back to fumbling out beginner level tunes on the piano?

But then in February we held a special evening show (dubbed Evening with the Arts – we’re SO original, I know!) and invited the dads to come and see. And we invited the adults coming to also perform something if they wanted. And this little boy came with his dad, and the two of them sang a song together, a cappella, in perfect harmony. It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard in my life. It was Afternoon with the Arts at its finest hour, you could say.

And after they were done singing, the ROCK BAND jumped up, popped a disc into the player and did their lip-sync air guitar thing. And the kids watching responded (in an almost Pavlovian kind of way) by screaming and cheering like the Beatles had just landed, and I was just disgusted and tired of it all by then. All the work we’d put into making this happen, all so we could watch these kids do NOTHING up there. No thanks.

But the next month, when we sent out the signup notice, that mom put her 3 kids down for ROCK BAND again, and the HIP HOP act went in there too, and I finally emailed my friend as diplomatically as I could and told her I thought ROCK BAND really had to stop. I didn’t mind if the kids wanted to do rock music or hip hop, but if they wanted to do it in the future, they needed to actually PERFORM the song themselves. No more lip sync-ing. No more air guitar. It was just getting ridiculous. I also asked her if she thought I was being too picky, and if she said yes, I was ready to bite my tongue. I mean: who am I to say if it’s ART or not, right?

But my friend agreed. She told me she’d been thinking the exact same thing. But she wanted to wait until the year was done before saying anything. Let’s finish out the year, she said, and then next year, we’ll put some guidelines in writing and start the year fresh. She was moving across the country in a month or two and wouldn’t be here to start the year fresh with me, which made it much easier on her to say “oh, let’s just wait till the new year starts” but she’d just had a baby too, so I didn’t want to press the issue. I was just glad she’d been thinking like me. That I wasn’t being crazy or mean by wanting to stop this weird un-artistic trend that had developed.

So, fast forward to last week. The new year is starting up. Another mom stepped into the place my friend vacated when she moved. This is a good friend, who also agreed that it was time to refocus our little arts program. I didn’t think people would be overly upset about it. So when the call came out from the leader of our little homeschool group to come to the planning meeting, I signed up and went to the meeting without thinking much about what I was going to say about Afternoon with the Arts.

Big mistake.

When it came time to talk about it, and I mentioned that we were going to be limiting the kinds of acts that the kids could do that year, all hell broke loose. The mom with the ROCK BAND kids got upset. I knew she would. She’s a mess and a generally unpleasant person. She’s made it clear on many occasions that no one has it harder than she does, that she doesn’t like her own children, and often chastises people for not helping her enough with whatever she thinks we should be helping her with. We all have spent the past year tiptoeing around her IMPENDING NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. Entire families have pulled away from her and her children in an act of self-preservation. I’d already had a couple problems with her in other activities, and I knew she’d take this badly. So, I said to her, Look, I’m not trying to single just your kids out. I’m not trying to mess with you. I’m just trying to bring this thing back to where it was supposed to be.

It didn’t go well at all. The fact that the HIP HOP kid is the son of the leader of the group didn’t help me much at all either. She got just as mad as the ROCK BAND mom. Then everyone started brainstorming OPTIONS for me. Like maybe we’d do a special ROCK BAND night. Or maybe the kids would have to take turns doing ROCK BAND. It all began to spiral out of control, and all their suggestions just added extra work to me, as the planner of the event. And I got mad. I bared my teeth a little. I told them if someone else wanted to do this thing, I’d be happy to pass it off on them. That it took an enormous amount of work to run the program. That we’d had a very specific vision for it way back when we started it and that the vision was getting lost in air guitar.

At that point, someone said, “you know… there are air guitar competitions all over the world… can you really honestly say that air guitar isn’t art?”

I almost cried right there. Picture it, if you can: there I was, the woman who’ s married to a rocket scientist who’s also a thrash metal bass player, a man who once took guitar lessons from John Petrucci, and who once was in a band that opened for Machine Head and Otep, sitting at a table in a Borders bookstore coffee shop listening to a bunch of “good Christian homeschooling mothers” defend the artistic genre of TEEN BOP RAPPER AIR GUITAR.

Somebody just fucking shoot me already.

More heated discussion ensued. I was no longer sure what I was trying to say or do anymore. I only knew I wanted to get the hell out of there. I threw my hands up in the air and said: “Okay!!! I stand corrected! If you think it’s art, then you decide. I leave it up to you as the parents to determine if your child is presenting something artistic.” It wasn’t what I wanted to say, but it was the only thing I could think of to say to MAKE THE CONVERSATION STOP. Then I made a ridiculous show of saying I felt uncomfortable and wanted to leave. And the whole meeting pretty much broke down (which made me feel worse) and I managed to just get out. I was 45 minutes in to an anxiety attack that would last about 16 hours.

I went home, told RegularDad the whole story, lay awake most of the night and wondered what the hell I was going to do.