This article originally appeared at The Huffington Post.
When I tell people I have had three scholarships in my life, 2 academic and 1 music they are impressed. When I tell them I studied piano for 12 years but stopped short of Grade 8 (the highest grade), they are impressed. When I say I won every form prize in my junior school, won competitions for speech and drama, poetry reading, the bishop chorister's award and played the lead 'Alice' in Alice in Wonderland, all before the age of 11, they ask me why I don't do any of it now? But of course I don't normally tell anyone these things. Because I didn't win them. My mother did.
My mother cared much for my education and my accomplishments. We were a team she and I.
"I want you to play the piano," she said. "Music is one of the greatest pleasures you can know. I was deprived of piano lessons when I was little, but you must have them. I want you to have it all. But you must practise. Thirty minutes every day."
That's a long time when you're 5 years old. But when I didn't, she'd get angry and remind me of her deprivation. She wanted me to be grateful to her. My fingers practised… and my teeth bit into the wood of the piano. I gnawed away at it, the instrument that I had been forced to play. And that I hated. The varnish wore off where I bit it and helped me cope because I could see physical proof of my hate. Hate that I couldn't share with her (or anyone else), because every time I did, she'd trot out the story of how she would have loved to be in my place. The only respite I had was on holiday. Until she bought me an electric organ for Christmas, because she cared so much that I would suffer from lack of practice.