Rules for Living

M came home with her school picture today. "I look horrible," she says. "Can we do a re-take?"

Photo looks perfectly lovely, of course, and on some level she knows it because when I tell her so, she easily changes her position. Her default attitude toward herself is hypercritical--and toward her friends, overly accepting. I'm not sure how to help her out of it, except by pointing out (again and again) that real friends don't persistently hurt our feelings and poke at our choices. "Better to have no friends," I've said, though that's an untenable slice of hell for a 10-year-old girl. Why does she make herself available to these little shits? What is it in her composition that keeps her from trusting her own sense of how things are? And how did--and do--I contribute to it?

I have her school photos stacked in one frame, one on top of the other, most recent one facing out. Every year I open the frame and slide the new one in, and glance at the ages that have slid past. She had no front teeth in first grade, and her hair was blonder and curly. In third grade she got pierced ears, and they'd closed up by fourth grade. She found a smile she likes in second grade and has used it ever since; her last authentic, nervous giggle-smile was in kindergarten. The soft vulnerability leaves her eyes a little more every year; it all gets internalized, inexorably, as it did in the rest of us: hit by hit. Kills me.

***

I'm buying a piano. A beautiful piano. I've played since I was 7, and I've been quite good at different times in life--all of them pre-dating children. Piano was the thing that set me apart in a family of seven. At a certain point in my life--for about a decade, I guess--my whole identity was intensely tied to the piano. Until I became intensely tied to children instead.

A few days ago a friend of a friend offered me a free piano. An older man had died and the piano didn't sell in the estate sale, so it was mine for the cost of transporting it home. I went to look at it: an old upright Vose with a few missing veneers on the keys and a cracked sound board, and sun-crackled finish and warped case. It made me feel so sad: that abandoned, mistreated instrument, not even good enough for a $25 sale; an unwanted remnant of a lonely life (or so it seemed, from the map the guy left behind.) Just sad. I said I'd take it. And I came to my senses by the time I got home, and called to change my mind.

Saturday I'm going to visit a guy who sells refurbished Steinways and Bosendorfers and Estonias. I'm going to find the right one and bring it into our house, and make the space for it, and pay for it over a few years. And I'm going to take lessons again, to get back the touch I used to have. It feels a little selfish--I should put the money into a college fund, or save it for whatever disaster lurks.

But I'm dying for a little simple beauty. I'm dying to write a book, or to fall in love, or to enjoy making music again. And in ten years M will be gone to college, and then L, and I'll be 54, and paying for college for seven years straight, at least.

I'm so excited I have butterflies in my stomach...