Back at age 12, I decided that I wanted to start playing piano at church. Our small country parish had one church organist who played on Sundays, but if you went to church on Saturday night, there was no music. There were gaps to be filled.
I remember one conversation with our Church organist where he wrote down all the times when music was needed during the Mass, and how you knew when to come in. It was overwhelming. He told me I would figure it out. One thing he told me then: “I was terrified for probably every Sunday of my first two years playing for church. I thought there would never be a day when I wouldn’t be scared; but then, one day, I realized that the fear was gone.”
Our little country parish was thankful to have some music on Saturday nights rather than none at all, and gave me carte blanche to choose the music each week for that Saturday evening Mass. I look back very grateful that they let me cut my teeth in some very embarrassing ways, largely unbeknownst to myself at the time. We had a Clavinova
that could be pre-recorded to play some the Mass music (it was still a pretty daunting task to learn it all in a week), and sometimes I pressed the play button at a very wrong time and prompted craned necks and giggles. At one point, I was listening to a lot of Dar Williams and watching a lot of Touched by an Angel and thought it would be a good idea to compose a song in that style about how angels were our saviors and they came in weird disguises. I still hope to this day that people were not able to understand the words to that theologically disastrous song.
This all came to mind last Sunday, when a student of mine, “C,” played her first entire Mass. When our music director approached me last year and asked me if I’d be interested in apprenticing a 13-year-old girl in learning how to play piano for Mass, I was very excited to say yes. I wanted C to have more one-on-one help than I had had, so that she could be truly confident about what she was doing.
So for the past 9 months, we have drilled the parts of the Mass - what is called “Ordinary,” what is called “Proper,” what priests' words are the cues you need to listen for, how you craft an “intro” from the hymn
- how to improvise during the times at church when there needs to be music, but there isn’t enough time to do a whole other verse. We’ve talked about keys and key signatures, fingerings for the big chords, how to watch your cantor to give them cues or to take them. It’s a lot to learn. C has been coming to play parts of the Mass for most weeks during this time, and finally it was time for her to take the reins completely. She learned the four hymns/songs and the seven parts of Mass, and now she prepared to do it all herself.
So, when I met her last Sunday morning, and asked her how she was doing with everything, she smiled shyly and said, “I’m really nervous.”
We walked through several of the pieces, which were all prepared and sounded confident, except the opening song, which had several off notes, slow-downs and blunders. I had heard her play it a few days before much more confidently, and I had a moment of inner conflict, trying to figure out what C (and the congregation) needed most. If she started the Mass on her least confident hymn and it was a mess, would that shake her confidence for the rest? Should I offer to take over for her on this one, so that she could focus on what was already flawless? Or should I be encouraging and try to build her up beforehand, knowing that her blunders were most likely nervousness, rather than not being prepared?
What finally came to me was those embarrassing, messy and awkward “first times” that I went through, learning to play for Mass, and how my patient first congregation was so appreciative and warm toward all those goofy first steps. Had they not been so supportive and so trusting of me, when I knew nothing and had so little confidence, I’m not sure I would have developed enough confidence to keep going, and to get better. That kind 5:00 Mass group gave me a wide berth - and now I’ve been playing piano for Mass for 22 years! Please don't do the math about how old that makes me.
So, I said nothing, and decided not to take over, and decided that C needed to play this entire Mass herself, however it went, and that we would embrace however it went, together. And C played that first hymn with a lot more confidence and maybe only two slight, unnoticeable blunders, and was able to go home that day knowing that she did a great job all on her own.
C’s first time playing piano for an entire Mass reminded me of my nephew “J”’s first time paying for something with his own money.
He wanted Pokemon cards,
so he had been watching the prices at Walmart, and saving up money to buy his own pack for some time. Despite his dad’s admonishment that Pokemon cards are “just gambling for kids,” J was determined.
We went to the Walmart in town, and walked toward the Pokemon aisle. I don’t remember how much they were, but let’s say $2.88. J carefully counted up the loose change in his hand, and held the coins tightly. We talked about the fact that he would need some extra money to account for the sales tax.
We found a cashier lane, and J’s dad and siblings waited behind him with a cart of groceries. Meanwhile, J talked about how nervous he was about if he was going to get it right, and what if he hadn’t counted the coins right, and how he didn’t know what to expect. I told J that everybody has to learn how to buy things with their money sometime, and that nobody knows what they’re doing the first time, and that’s completely normal.
However, the line behind us got longer and longer,
as customers decided to check out at the same time. My brother-in-law saw how long the lines were and how many coins were in J’s hand, needing to be counted out slowly for the cashier. When J’s total was announced, he pressed a $5 bill in the cashier’s hand to hurry things along.
As we took our bags out the door, J said, “I failed. I couldn’t even get that right.”
My heart broke a little bit. “J, there was nothing about what you did that was a failure,” I said. “You knew exactly how much money you needed and you had it.”
“Yeah, but then why did Dad have to pay for me?” he said.
“He saw how long the lines were, and he was afraid of holding other people up, that’s all that was going on,” I said, but I sort of wished that we, the world at large, could have spared an extra few minutes to give J the chance to count out his money slowly and to figure it out, so that he could have left the store one more step closer to that confidence that he could do this - he could pay for things with his own money.
C and J both taught me something by these experiences.
Why are we so resistant to allowing our kids’ first times at things to be awkward, messy, slow, ridiculous, etc?
Maybe it’s our culture today - maybe it’s that sense of pressure that we feel for every moment to be ready for Snapchat or a resume.
We’re so seen, all the time. And we have so many measuring tools. The opinions of others have never been so central to the human experience. Almost everything we do is reviewable, zero to five-star-able.
And this is the landscape in which we are raising our kids - to be judged and reviewed and critiqued. We are preparing them for review and we know that we will also come under scrutiny. We ache for that like button, and we see our vulnerable kids putting their necks out there and can’t bear that they might not get the likes.
With C, I was afraid that if she blundered her way through the opening song, I would be judged - for not drawing the line, for not preparing her well.
With J, maybe my brother-in-law was afraid of ticking off the other waiters-in-line. Maybe he thought J would be less embarrassed if he just took care of it. Or maybe he thought that we just couldn’t afford J the time to have his first time, that day.
And I think the other reason we resist a bad first time, is that we’re afraid of what our kids’ take-away message will be. Maybe it will be, “I worked really hard, and I failed. I never want to try again.”
Maybe we don’t realize the beauty of the first time experience.
If you’re an adult, you can look back and remember hundreds of first times. The first time you drove a car, rode a bike, went to school, got up in front of an audience.
I remember the queasy nervousness that just wouldn’t calm down. I remember, at age 12, riding in the car to my first day of swimming lessons, telling myself, “First times always feel like this. But then they always end up okay. So this first time is going to end up okay, too, probably.”
What I didn’t realize until walking through first times with my younger students, is how beautiful a first time is. It’s beautiful, because you’re suddenly in a place where you have to face your vulnerabilities. In the first time, you are uniquely aware in your nerves, in your heart pounding, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Someone, at some point, told me that humility isn’t self-deprecation. Humility is knowing the truth about yourself. In the first time experience, we cannot be arrogant, or think we are in control. We know we are not in control - and thus we see ourselves honestly, as we really are. We grapple with all the inner demons in those moments before hitting the stage, or the bike, or the “on” switch. We tell the “You can’t do it” voice, “I’m doing it, regardless of what you say.”
And the power of the first time, is that you have conquered the demon “Can’t” by doing the thing you have never done. This alone, whether you fall on your butt or do okay or do great, is a huge accomplishment.
You also learn to stand up for you, in the smallest, least self-important view of yourself you can have.
And if you fall on your butt, you still walk away with the knowledge that you tried it, and if you tried it this time, you can at least give it a try another time too.
Maybe we remember our hurts and pains, and are afraid to let our children receive the hurts and pains we did.
The first rejection. The first broken heart. The moment you humiliated yourself by singing a hokey Dar-Williams-esque song at Mass. These are moments that you can still look back and cringe that they ever happened.
Well, fellow adults - we need to remember to also dwell on the aftermath of these pains. How we persisted beyond them. How we put our hearts out there again, and how we learned to embrace the vulnerable, and how it ended up good. How the laughter and derision of our classmates taught us to be more creative, and helped us learn to laugh at ourselves. How we learned to stand up for ourselves and thus became attractively confident. And these growths need to be at the forefront of our minds when we parent and teach kids.
We need to remember that, despite the strongest of urges to shield kids from the hurts and pains, that it is the hurts and pains that often are gifts - gifts that break our skin, but enable us to grow new, more durable and stronger skin.
Lastly - do I model “falling on my butt” to my kids?
Kids, not just to the parents out there, but our kids meaning our students, our young neighbors, or nieces and nephews. Do we continue to show them how to embrace walking into the world not knowing what you're doing?
I see hundreds of parents behind cameras, documenting their kids’ first times… We know that our first dance recital, piano lessons, etc. were good for us, and know they'll be good for our kids too. But sometimes I think we check our own first times once we have kids. We figure that we’re adults now, and so we’re there to support and teach them to do first times, and we’re done.
As a teacher, how many times am I myself walking out to that vulnerable “first time” of the stage? Do I remember that my example is the number one teacher of my students?
As a parent, am I showing through my own humble failures, how to embrace them, and even to be delighted by my human frailty?
One of my favorite memories of my dad is the time we walked through Cabela’s, and he, looking at some cute little jumpers that said “Daddy’s little deer” for my baby sister, accidentally collapsed and entire rack of clothes on the ground.
My fourteen-year-old self was mortified and looking around in the hopes that no one had noticed.
My dad very quietly and unconcernedly picked up every last one of those jumpers and put the rack back up.
By that one small thing, my dad modeled to me how you respond when you fall on your butt.
