Being Forced To Do An Activity Isn’t Healthy

I’m grateful and resentful at the same time

Late at night, in his darkened hospital room, my grandfather said to me, “Friend, I’m not ready to go to heaven.” He had called me Friend from the moment I was born. This was one of the funny little eccentricities that made him special.

I chuckled. He was known to turn words sideways on you. “What do you mean?”

He answered, “I don’t know how to play the trumpet, I only play guitar. Saint Peter only wants trumpet players.”

We had a laugh together, but there was something different in his eyes. A distance. An uncertainty. A fear. We shook hands, and as it turned out, I would be the last person ever to shake his hand.

When I was five years old, my grandfather bought me a guitar. To me it was a toy, but it didn’t take long to learn otherwise. Teaching was not new to him as he had taught my dad in much the same way. My dad was quoted as saying, “You can make me do it, but you can’t make me like it.”

My grandfather was self-taught. There were no cheats when he learned, only sheet music and hard work. It was something he wanted to do, and nobody was going to stop him learning. Furthermore, nobody was going to stop him from passing down his passion.

He sat me down to teach me, but the lessons soon became difficult, as anything worthwhile tends to do. He was dead serious about teaching me, and I was dead serious about not wanting to learn anymore.

I employed stall tactics and other excuses to get out of lessons. Homework, swimming, broken limbs, etc., though nothing ever worked. He’d learned a few things in the years between my dad and me, and employed a new tactic: stubbornness. He never got angry, he would simply persist and wear me down. He was relentless in his pursuit of me learning how to play.

It was maddening.

Over time, my escape strategies grew more complex. They escalated for several years, although no strategy ever truly worked. I occasionally resorted to tantrums, and these were SERIOUS tantrums. He should have killed me, or at least given up, but he didn’t.

In one tantrum, I ripped apart his music studio by ripping the music stand clean off the wall and threw everything I could move. Another time I remember taking a bag of my own toy cars and slamming them with all my might into the ground, smashing most of them to unrecognizable shreds. I even kicked in the dashboard of his El Camino. It was pure rage.

Looking back on it with a modicum of emotional intelligence, I was traumatized. I was forced to do something I didn’t want to do. I HATED being there knowing he would come home from work and pull me away from what I wanted to do. I spent all that time trying to escape a situation, and that is AWFUL for a kid. They feel trapped, and it can manifest later in life as other problems.

And my parents went along with it. I was never able to explore my own creativity or passion. I never tried any sports. It was all music for my entire life. That’s a recipe for resentment.

This is what past generations did. Their form of parenting was control and discipline. Manipulation and guilt. Shame, threats of violence, and sometimes actual violence. Demands for respect when it may or may not have been warranted.

I realize we tend to parent how we were parented, but that’s exactly how you pass down trauma from generation to generation.

I carried a lot of resentment around for many years about being forced into musical servitude. Now, as I continue my journey into addiction recovery, I’m learning to let it all go. Sometimes I wonder if I’m being overdramatic, but as I’ve learned about my own emotions, I recognize their legitimacy.

Despite the complex trauma, and somehow through all my resistance and his now-questionable tactics, he did manage to teach me to play the guitar. What I didn’t know was how many other lessons were hidden inside that little treasure chest he was giving me.

He was trying to teach me lessons of perseverance, practice, patience, and enjoying the journey. I suppose I did learn some of that, but I learned some more sinister lessons at the same time. I also learned about parenting without expectations, allowing my kids to find their own creative outlets, and how to love unconditionally.

I know he loved me. But I’ll never know what life was like without forcing music on me. I often wonder if he thought of that when considering his legacy.

Thankfully, times have changed. Today I see the joy in my dad’s eyes as he teaches my daughter. He’s not forcing her as he and I were forced, he’s allowing her to come to him and set her own pace. She truly wants to learn from him.

Learning guitar has shaped my entire life. It took me all over the country in one way or another, and every step I took began with those.

Despite the way I learned, I’m forever grateful.

Here’s a story by Courtney Capone that hit me hard.