My mother had been trying to burden me with music since I was a child. She herself was a teacher at the village music school. As you understand, there weren’t many people who wanted to, so my mother set out to raise me as a “music person”, but I just hated the piano. I could not play or read music, so I memorized how to play it and I suffered all those years, until I graduated from the school. Then I could breathe a sigh of relief and forget music like a bad dream.
When my husband and I had Monica, I didn’t even think my mother would still be so obsessed with her crazy idea with music. When we sent our granddaughter to her grandmother’s village for the summer, we had no idea what they were doing there. Moreover, it was hard to guess, because otherwise Monica was only in school all year and showed no interest in any circles. For nine months of school she made no sign at all that she liked playing the piano or music in general.
Unintentionally, when I found out that Monica was twelve years old, instead of going to the river and playing with her classmates, she was sitting over sheet music, I had a fight with her mother. I thought it was all her influence, and that these were unnecessary things that Monica would never need in her life – I had no use for them.
And then my daughter got older and secretly didn’t give up music. She liked to play, and she even wrote her own music. She never showed it to my husband and me, because she knew that I was always just “clucking my tongue and rolling my eyes,” thinking that studying was more important.
Monica had entered a music contest on her own and, unexpectedly for all of us, won it. The music she wrote, which seemed to me to be as gibberish as that tedious Mozart and Beethoven stuff, appealed to the rest of us. At sixteen, Monica began to be invited to other competitions, she was given prizes and invited to the conservatory. But two years there was enough for her to begin conducting an orchestra, and she herself has not stopped writing new music. She makes her way everywhere she can, one day wants to write soundtracks for some foreign drama, and considers her innate talent a credit to her grandmother.
In part, I’m grateful to my mother, too. Not for myself, but for Monica. What I hated, my daughter loved with all her heart.
