When my youngest daughter graduated from high school, I honestly thought that I was done with all the school events, fundraisers, and parental participation nonsense. As I sent EM2 off to college, I told myself that the kids are (mostly) adults now and don’t need dad showing up at band concerts and football games or volunteering to chaperone school trips. I can just hang out at home and answer the occasional text message from one of the kids saying they were still alive, and could I please send money.
Turns out I was deluding myself.
It ain’t over by a long shot.
Recently, I found myself attending a concert at Sacramento State University for the sole reason of being there to support my kid. I can’t think of any other reason that I would ever have gone to such an event. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that the concert was bad or there was anything wrong with it, it’s simply not something I want to go watch. Ever.
I have attended school concerts and recitals without fail ever since EM2 was in middle school. Every couple of months there has been another event my wife has dragged me to because, “we have to support our children.”
I’m tired and I just want it to stop.
Yes, of course I want to be a supportive parent for my kids. I was just hoping that now that they are away at college, I could be supportive from a long way away. You know, like on my own living room couch, watching television and drinking something heavily alcoholic.
I would be happy to pick up a phone and tell them how much I love and care about them, then hand the call off to their mother, since she genuinely seems to like talking to those two moochers.
When my wife told me that she had purchased tickets to go see EM2’s concert a couple weeks ago, I told her that I thought we had already gone to enough concerts and school events through high school. I asked why we should continue to torment ourselves while she was at college.
My wife tried to convince me that the college concert performances would be much better than the high school ones and that I would enjoy them much more.
Spoiler alert: she was wrong.
In fact, I would argue that the college performances are worse. For example, high school band concerts are free. My wife and I had to pay to attend my daughter’s most recent concert at the college. It wasn’t a lot, true, but it also wasn’t free. In my mind, I believe free is the better of the two options.
Also, the college concerts are much longer than the high school performances. In high school, the teachers and the school administration have lives and family they want to go home to. Apparently, in college, nobody has anywhere they need to be, so a concert that runs two and a half hours is no big deal.
My wife argued that the college students are much better musicians than the high school students. This may be true, but I don’t think that is much of a benefit. It’s still an amateur orchestra.
Imagine you are in a room listening to two crying babies. It is possible to make a logical, objective argument that one of those babies is much better at crying than the other. But just because one is clearly better than the other doesn’t mean that anybody actually wants to listen to either one of them.
This is pretty much how I feel about orchestra music.
And by the way, regarding this particular concert, all of the above arguments are completely moot since the college invited a high school orchestra to join them for the performance. So, I had to pay to get in, the concert was much longer than normal, AND the musicians weren’t any better than high school students since many of them were high school students!
During the performance, I kept having flashbacks to all the concerts I had attended in my daughter’s middle school and high school gymnasiums. It was like a musical PTSD episode.
To be fair, I’m sure there were many people in attendance at the concert that were happy to be there and greatly enjoyed the music that was performed. I believe my wife might even be one of those people. I, however, was merely trying to be supportive and make the best of a bad situation.
When it was over, I hugged my daughter and told her she was the best musician in the entire school and all the other kids should go home hanging their heads in shame at being so badly outclassed. I complimented her and praised her, and she had no idea that I would rather have been chewing glass than attending the concert.
Because that’s what a good father does.
I will do the same thing at her next concert. And the one after that. And the one after that. And, so on until I die.
Which, with my luck, will probably happen while I’m on my way home from a concert.
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