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I’ll admit that on the road of parenting, I have taken a few bad detours. However, as it turns out, one of the decisions I made regarding my sons’ future actually turned out to be….decent. When Kegan, my oldest was in fifth grade, I enrolled him in music lessons. This was a pattern I repeated with Carrick and Liam. I assumed that my boys would love music because I did. Simplistic thinking, really. So I was crushed when in ninth grade, Kegan came to me and announced, “I want to quit band.” “What? Quit band?” Frankly I could not have been more shocked if he had been requesting a sex change operation. “But band is my, I mean, YOUR life!” I enthused. “No.” He shook his head. “I don’t like it.” So I did what any good dictator, I mean mother, would do. I FORBID him to quit band. “I FORBID YOU TO QUIT BAND!” Then I softened the blow. “But if you still feel the same after one more year, I will let you off the hook.” I took a whole lot of flack for that move. One mother cornered me in the hall at church and told me that it was CRIMINAL when parents forced their children to remain in activities they did not like. “Then lock me up and throw away the keys, Debbie”, I said to her, “because I am CRIMINALLY INSANE!” The next year Kegan decided he might as well stick out band for the rest of high school. “Why not?” He shrugged. It was then that I suggested he start taking guitar lessons. He balked. “I don’t like the teacher.” “Who cares?” I shot back. “You are not going to like everyone in life. Get over it.” He signed up for guitar. Before we knew it, his room was alive with the sounds of strumming and he spent a lot of his extra cash on upgrades and equipment. When he went to college, he took his guitar collection with him. “Just for fun.” Just for fun evolved into a gig with a band, and the next thing we knew, he was strumming on stage. My little Kegan. Of course, this was all in theory, for me, because although I had heard the demo cd, I hadn’t actually been invited to hear his band play. Until last week. He told my hubby and I that if we WANTED, his band would be playing at a local bar and we could come. (PLEASE DON’T EMBARRASS ME!) Is what I knew he was thinking. So I didn’t. I was VERY well behaved, if I must say so myself. Even though I wanted to scream, “THAT’S MY BABY!” At the top of my lungs and also, recklessly dance with the college students. Instead I tapped my foot and tried to appear, you know, motherly. It’s not my best look. The band was good, GREAT, and I am not saying that just because it was my son’s band. They really were, and this surprised me. I somehow thought that they’d be mediocre but my motherly heart would swell with such pride that I would overlook every missed note and botched rhythm. Instead I was spellbound. Did I MENTION how badly I wanted to dance up in front of the stage with the college kids? I resisted. That night in bed, my phone beeped the signal that I had a text message. It was 2:30 a.m. I could barely focus. “Thanks for coming.” The text read. It was from Kegan. “And Mom, I know you wanted to dance up in front of the stage.”
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