Last Tuesday, The Boy took me to lunch with a gift card Poppy had given him to do just that. I picked him up from Grammy’s, and we went to McDonald’s. Somewhere along the way, I asked him if he was still sad about the concert.
“Hm,” he said, indicating he didn’t have a ready answer.
“Or maybe you haven’t been thinking about it too much,” I suggested.
“Yeah, I haven’t been thinking about it much,” he parroted back. “I just wish it hadn’t have happened.”
“Me too,” I said. “Those kids made a poor choice, didn’t they?”
“Yes, they did.”
I told him a little bit of the conversation I had with the principal. He asked if the band director had done anything about it. I told him the kids had had to talk to the principal and Mr. Collins about their choices. “The principal didn’t think the kids did it to be mean, though. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“It’s hard to tell if someone is just being mean, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“They told the principal they did it because you were playing wrong notes.”
“I wasn’t playing wrong notes!” he said, alarmed.
“Even if you were, it still wasn’t their place. You don’t touch other people’s instruments.”
“No, you don’t touch other people’s instruments,” he agreed.
I asked him to tell me if anything like that happened again, and our conversation moved on to other things. He’s sad because he can’t get that performance back. I think he knows the kids treated him differently than they would have treated a neurotypical kid. I think he’s wondering why they did it. I needed him to know the jist of what had been said at the meeting and what the kids involved had said to the principal. He has a right to know. Along with the right to play.
When I was a band director, it was always expected that I took the bands to “Festival,” which is a nicey-nice term for what it really was – competition. Ideally, the judges would rate each band according to an ideal, a standard, but in reality, they were comparing your group to the other groups they’d just heard, and would hear after yours, and indeed the phantom college band they had playing in their head at all times, being conducted by some very famous college band director. And when you were done they would post your scores in the cafeteria, right under the group that had performed before you, and right above the group after you, so everyone could compare… Yep, it was a competition through and through.
Simple. I Just Do. 