Child prodigy or a noise bag?

Ongoing 'mommy series' of blogs…continued from where I left off with

Mom in Overdrive.

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There are times when my motherly instincts take over and I reason out I need to weed out the bad and the ugly from the face of this earth and leave only the good around. That way my children can assimilate it and grow up like the pristine, freshly fallen snow.

Right! What was I thinking? In your dreams, says a little voice at the back of my head.

Then there is the time of ‘nurture’. Getting a handle on what is important for your precious and exploring the possibilities of releasing it, so it manifests itself in full glory and several years down the road it goes to fruition and we parents rejoice…

In simple words find the ‘talent’ in your kid that you think merits attention, encourage it and bring it out into the world. How does a parent find what is the innate talent in a child? That would be a million dollar question for a parent who has no clue. On the other hand if your child is a born musician or a trapeze artist it is easy to recognize the symptoms and treat it with due diligence. This is easier said than done, considering that you always want the best for your kids.

Nobody gives a parent a handbook titled “Rearing kids for dummies” or “How to spot talent in your kids?” Although I must confess such a book would have been very handy and would have helped us a lot. There are days I took my son to Karate class thinking he would ace it, become a black belt and teach me a few tricks on self-defense. Not that I really need it. I can be quite menacing if I wanted to be …all I need to do is snarl and round up my big eyes. Honestly, it hasn’t worked before. But just the thought has given me the courage in the past to lead a decently defensive life. I digress; the blog is not about hapless parents but about my son’s hitherto undiscovered talents which is still ‘undiscovered’.

The karate ended one week into training. Junior reported all the ‘haahs’ and the ‘huuuhs’ are driving him crazy and ‘its boring’. So there went our dream of making him a national champion. Onto the next talent search…“Baseball”…Yes! That’s the one, we cried aloud. So off we went packing him to the baseball league all dressed up with mitts and cleats. Everything went fine until we found junior languishing on the ‘bases’ making mud mounds and ignoring the ball when it slithered next to him. The mitt was productively being used to make mountains from the mud and the cleats were being used to kick dust. The coach threw him out…not exactly…but said very lovingly that he needs to focus on the game and not end up in dreamland. After all he has some of his mother’s genes. Can’t blame sonny boy!

Then started the “guitar classes”… We rushed off to buy him a red guitar that made a hole in our pocket but in possession of a lovely red guitar. The guitar now sits as a piece of art-deco on the wall, un-touched and un-played. Occasionally when I am bored or the little one is in a mood to twang a bar we take it off the wall and bring it to life. The only thing the family learnt to play was do… re…. me …fa… so… la… si… do…or something like that as in ‘sound of music’. Absolutely no comparison to the …Von Trapp family in the movie...in fact ‘simply atrocious’ would be a better word to describe it. This comes as a surprise since all off us are musically inclined and love music in every form...people have remarked that I sing well but now I wonder if they were just being nice, hoping I would stop. We console ourselves saying that people who appreciate music are also essential in this world.

All hell broke loose when junior discovered that he possessed a rare talent for the “flute”. It happened when his teacher gave him a free recorder in class for something that I cannot remember. The recorder is another name for the ‘flute’ that I learnt the hard way.

Junior came home and declared that he wanted to be a ‘recordist’.

I said “sure sweets… why not?” having no clue what it meant. My imagination led me to thinking that he wanted to record stuff on to something.

Then he pulled the offending instrument out of his bag and showed me what looked like a flute.

“Wonderful, it’s a flute,” I said recognizing the musical instrument.

“Mom, my teacher said I play well for a beginner,” he said.

The mommy in me was glowing with pride and I gave him a big hug and said “Play please!”

Junior started immediately by looking at the notes in his book. As he went further I found my pinky fingers reaching for my ears trying to shut out noise. I hastily withdrew my fingers and instead tapped to the music telling myself that it was a matter of days before sonny boy became an accomplished flutist. I have been wrong before but there was always hope that I would be proved right for once.

Days went into weeks and months and junior hadn’t progressed from ‘hot cross buns’ or the initial ‘phee phee’s’…by then our patience was wearing thin too. Hubby insisted that I be the talent scout since I had a keen sense of music. In other words he passed the bucks to me so as to stay away from the talent exhibition. There are times I have hidden the offending instrument but some how it has always found its way out and into the hands of a diligent musician who wouldn’t give up. It’s been a year now and somehow, somewhere it dawned on junior that he wasn’t cut out to be a musician and everybody in the family heaved a sigh of relief.

The search continues for the elusive talent. He seems to have been endowed with the ‘jack of all trades-master of none’ genes; again I don’t have to wonder where he got that from?

There have been flashes in the pan of some genius traits but nothing has stood the test of time. We have resigned ourselves to the fact that we did fine in life without being extraordinarily gifted and our sons might follow suit, carving out their own niches in this world, eventually. Until then we will continue to endure, enhance, encounter and explore the ‘hidden’ talents.

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