Harp Lessons
The first time she saw a full-sized harp, my daughter Clover was speechless. When its owner Pam invited her to play it, she was too overcome with emotions I can’t even properly name to accept. Clover had just turned five and had received a dulcimer — her “lap harp” — for her birthday after months of pretending to play harp by strumming on a wooden folding drying rack. After she was able to work through whatever big feelings she had at seeing a real, full-sized harp and tentatively pluck a few strings while sitting on my lap, her requests for one of her own began. After a few more encounters with Pam, it was becoming a necessity. “I need a harp, Mom,” she pleaded. “More than you know. More than you understand.”
Clearly, she has some kind of deep resonance with the instrument that I will probably never understand. Music is important to me, for sure: I love singing informally, and I have gone through casual flirtations with various instruments over the years. We listen to a wide array of music, and I’m probably down for seeing almost anything live. With Clover, though, the harp seems like a missing piece of her soul. She tells me that her feelings come out of her hands when she plays it.
She got her harp for Christmas, a little 19-string thing I snagged on Ebay. When she saw it on Christmas morning, despite asking for it almost daily for four months, she was too overcome to even look at it. Her own harp, and it took her an hour to touch it. She told me later it felt like her heart was the size of the whole room, and that she couldn’t touch it because she felt like she was going to explode.
My daughter is exactly the challenge that my mom probably wished upon me during my teenage years, which is another way of saying that we are similarly intense. She has inherited high personal standards, along with some of my anxious, perfectionistic streak. Thankfully, even at five years old, I can see that she’s going somewhere different. At that age, I already had a saccharine desire to over-please, a terror of being wrong, a crippling perfectionism. School was so easy for me that it was easy to be perfect at that game, most of the time, so I seemed well-adjusted, most of the time. Finding old home videos or stories I wrote at that age, though, shows adult-me how fragile this external construction was. I don’t think Clover has these hang-ups at all — her sense of being fully accepted in the world is still unshaken. This solid footing will hopefully help her step into her teens and twenties with more success (however you want to define that) than I did.
I won’t claim I’ve somehow shielded her from the effects of my own anxiety, so I’m sure the “nurture” side of things has a part to play. But I’ve been cautious enough, watchful enough to feel absolved of guilt that my parenting alone might have produced these tendencies in her. These perfectionistic bits of her seem inborn — starting with her refusal to exit the womb for an extra three weeks. Lord knows what she was hoping to get right in there, but she came out pretty pissed at having been coaxed into the spotlight. She’s exactly the same way now. She has always wanted to watch, and wait, and do things correctly. She didn’t walk until 16 months, when she took off running, no trace of the wobbly toddler gait. She didn’t want to draw for almost a year when she was three or four, and she had the presence of mind to explain that when she drew, her drawings didn’t look how she wanted them to.
Knowing all this, I can probably be forgiven for temporarily abandoning everything I believe about early childhood education to pursue formal lessons for a five-year-old. This sounds silly. Never had it occurred to me to find art classes when she felt her drawing wasn’t up to par, but when she came to me upset because she wanted her harp to sound better, I knew I certainly couldn’t help. I started looking around: would anyone be willing to take on a tiny but determined student, one who could barely read a handful of words, much less notes on a page?
I should back up for a moment to mention that I’m choosing not to send my kids to school — at least while they are small — for a few reasons. For one, I am firmly against early academics, especially reading instruction. You can come at it with spiritual reasoning, à la Steiner, or you can look at empirical data from Scandinavian countries, but it seems clear: for most kids, life in a literate society is all the curriculum they need to learn to read, age seven being the middle of the bell curve for when this happens. Assuming my kids don’t have learning disabilities that will require interventions to help that process along, I look at that information and I see two years of busywork at best, teeth-clenching struggles, outright fighting, and lasting damage to their inner worlds at worst. Even in the best case, why force what’s already coming?
I know it’s radical, but I feel this way about reading, about basic math skills — even learning to use the potty was a process that I decided to let unfold for my kids without having to make work for myself or strife between us. But for whatever reason, something about Clover’s request to take harp lessons short-circuited this part of my mind. Even when I did have thoughts along these lines, I told myself that I wouldn’t be doing her any harm — wouldn’t I just beletting her follow her passions?
After all, giving my kids the time and space and resources to explore their own interests is the other main reason I’ve always been insistent on homeschooling. Many times over the course of my life I’ve lamented what could have been if I had had the time, resources, and mental space to follow my interests as far as I wanted. I might have been speaking Japanese fluently while juggling careers as both an astronomer and a film director. Maybe I would be making films about space in Japanese!
Or maybe not — I am lucky enough to love my jobs, paid and unpaid, at this point in my life, and you can follow the trajectories of my interests and abilities through the decades without any huge surprises. (The fact that I work for a UU church, and in a directly spiritual capacity, probably shocks some of the people who knew me in my hard atheist days, but I promise it all makes sense when you live in my head.) This isn’t about a career path, anyway. A real “career” has never felt possible for me, and the world of work will have changed even more by the time Clover is an adult. I wouldn’t presume to try to prepare her in any concrete way for what she might be doing in the 2030s. The real issue for me is that I’ve always felt like a dabbler, a dilettante, and I would like my kids to feel really good at something. It doesn’t have to be something that becomes a job — it doesn’t need to be practical at all — but I’d like them to have the time and space in their lives to become experts.
It’s the tensions between these two desires that require me to constantly recalibrate my choices as a homeschooling parent. On the one hand there’s the desire not to rush things, to preserve my kids’ childhoods for play; on the other, to crack open the world for them and help them take the juiciest bites of this experience on this planet that they can.
This time, I opted to go for the juicy bite: I found a teacher who was game, and Clover seemed ecstatic. She hand-sewed a little felt pouch for her tuning key and we trundled off to a couple of lessons. I joined in, feeling the difficulty of proper hand positioning and copying the lessons so we could practice later.
It became immediately clear, though, that task number one had nothing to do with playing technique: Clover needed to learn the first seven letters of the alphabet in order.
We haven’t done any formal reading or writing instruction in our house, although both kids love identifying letters and writing a few words at a time. The Alphabet Song is not unfamiliar in our house, but as those with little kids probably know, before they’re really learning letters in earnest, this is just a song of nonsense syllables. And as it turns out, learning those letters, even in the service of improving her ability to play her beloved harp, is a non-starter for Clover. I don’t know yet if there’s a little dyslexia involved or if she’s just simply not developmentally there yet, but she cannot or will not learn those letters in order. She knows that the F string is blue and the C string is red, but the rest of them are mysteries to her. The information floats through her and does not stick.
Worse, the more we talked about letters, the less she wanted to play at all. She went five days without even touching her harp, as I grew more distressed about her lack of practice time. When she rejected my suggestion that her new flock of chicks might love a concert, I was alarmed.
I started giving her lectures about making commitments. I started giving her choices-that-weren’t-choices (“Play your harp or copy these letters,” I offered, to which Clover wisely replied “NO!” and ran outside to play in the mud.) When I found myself mentally designing a sticker chart to track practice time — a sticker chart, which goes against every belief I cherish about intrinsic motivation, self-directed learning, developmental appropriateness! — I took a deep breath. I had sworn I was not going to become a crazy harp mom or to try and create a prodigy, but this was getting ridiculously close. Was I offering a juicy bite of the world’s infinite potential, or was this becoming bitter medicine I was going to dutifully force without reflection?
I suggested that she back off from lessons for a while. (“You mean ‘quit,’” yells the part of my brain that wants her to be better than me, reminding me of all the things I abandoned as a child, reminding me how I can’t read music, my lack of expertise at anything.) She tells me she wants to start again the day after she turns six. Then, she claims, she’ll be ready.
Clover is one of my greatest teachers: she’s a mirror of my own flaws, an expert at weaseling out my own sensitive spots and pressing them so I can deal. She’s also one of the most delightful, unique humans I’ve ever met. More than anything, her role in my life so far has been to teach me the lesson of not-forcing — and that’s been something I’ve been doing deep work on. I’m reaping the rewards of not-forcing in other important parts of my life, which made it easier to make that choice here. Thankfully I was able to catch myself in only a matter of days this time, before I ruined the harp for her, before I damaged our bond.
Someday, when Clover is not so very tiny, perhaps I will step into the role of practice master — for an older child, that might well be appropriate. At age five, though, all I need to do is keep putting on interesting records, keep taking her to see live music, keep making sure she has the time to sit and play and sing every morning and afternoon if her spirit is so moved. More than that, whether or not the harp is her ultimate thing, her area of expertise, I’ve got to make sure she’s free to reject my agenda, to ignore my misguided control-freakishness and to stomp off into the mud, to keep her trust in those super big and intense feelings she inherited.
In the meantime, our chicks have been treated to twice-daily concerts, complete with intermissions, fancy dress definitely required. Her technique is imperfect, but those tiny hands will grow. Her tone is buzzy sometimes, but what I hear more than anything is pure joy flowing out of her hands. May it always be so.