thoughts, words, deeds

blame it on my parents

Talk Tuesday! What's something you do because your parents did it? And what something you don't do because your parents did it?

One aspect of my heritage that I blame on my parents is the fact that I sing. My father’s parents were both teachers, Grandpa in physics and Grandma in music. She taught for years until she got her PhD in music education and educated herself out of the price range of most of the schools in the area. But she had six kids (Dad was the fourth and first boy) and taught them all to sing. One of the last times we got together for a family reunion, she worked up an arrangement of a song and had us all sing in her church—imagine, seventy odd people (they had thirty-seven grandchildren plus the in-laws and the great-grands—we are a huge clan) including a four part men’s verse—well, we were impressive.

Mama’s family is smaller and less musical, but when she was young, she learned how to read music before she learned to read words. Grammy wasn’t musical, but she knew that Mama needed training, so she arranged for piano lessons, and Mama took to them. She taught all of us the piano. It only really took for two of my sisters, the one who got her master’s in collaborative piano (while being a full time mother with her first child) and the one who got her BA in music education. Her real instrument was the bass clarinet, but she knows enough that she can supplement her family’s income with beginning piano students.

So, we sing. All of us. Even another sister, who doesn’t sing much unless she’s belting (she was in drama) or at home. I started in the church choir when I was eight, mostly because Dad wouldn’t let me in until then, and I did my first solo when I was five (for mother’s day—I still remember the melody and most of the words to that one). We sing in the car together, and at church and around the piano at home, and when we’re visiting my sister (she directs the choir, so last time, we sang with them). I associate family with music.

Something that I don’t do because my parents did—that’s more difficult. Not because my parents don’t have annoying aspects to their personalities that I’ve tried my best to weed out of my own life so that I don’t annoy myself too much, but because I don’t notice. I can’t tell you how many times that I take an action and realize after doing it that I can trace the source of that action (or phrase or attitude) right back to my parents.

There are some things. Mama got her master’s in linguistics, which can mean that she’s a stickler for grammar (read Grammar Nazi), but I write poetry, where grammar is only as important as the ability to understand a poem. So, that’s a difference in attitude. Dad is a computer engineer. He thinks he knows everything, and in a lot of ways he’s right, because he has studied a lot. However, the most drag down, top of the voice fights that we’ve had have been when he doesn’t acknowledge that I’m just as competent in my field as he is in his. I bow to his knowledge of computers, he fails to acknowledge that I could know more about literature and writing than he does. So . . . that’s a difference.

They are good parents. All of us have grown up to be different people. They gave us what we needed to do that.