Princess Status

If not for the expectations of my boss and the desire to keep my teaching job, one piano lesson with little five-year-old Maddy would’ve been enough for me to write her off as incompetent. To be sure, she was cute. Her innocent green eyes were captivating, igniting with even the slightest spark of excitement. And it was not difficult to excite Maddy. From the moment her dad brought her into the studio, she was babbling over the pretty blue carpets (her favorite color that day), the “dreidel song”, and unicorns—all in less than 60 seconds. It was my first run-in with a child diagnosed with severe ADHD.  
 

At first, she seemed like every other beginner I’d taught: exultant in the grand occasion of a first piano lesson. I succeeded in getting her to perch “like a princess” on the wooden bench in front of the piano. She showed me how she could relax her wrist to gently hold an invisible bubble. We numbered her fingers. “Twos and threes, twos and threes,” she twittered, exploring the landscape of the keyboard…until she saw the full-length mirror. I internally groaned. Not the mirror. All thoughts of ebony configurations and curved fingers had fluttered away on the wings of her butterfly hair clip. 

Determined not to lose the concentration battle, I apprehended the disrupting mirror and flipped it around. Nevertheless, the princess spell was broken. We were only halfway through a standard lesson, but Maddy was done, and I was drained. A mere 12 minutes?! I had barely gotten her to align her fidgeting fingers with the correct keys, let alone coordinate them enough to play a note.
  

Teaching piano is an art I study and take pride in. She is simply not ready or not capable, I concluded. But when we trudged hand-in-hand back out to the lobby to meet her dad, I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I thought. “Lesson next week?” he beamed. I smiled back. 

Her father baffled me. Legend had it that he had been a great musician himself him at one time. He wore a pacified weariness that comes from working long hours each day and picking up the pieces of a broken family. Does he not see her obvious inability to learn and focus? This is a waste of his hard-earned money. Every week, I scrutinized his patience. He tuned his ear to his daughter’s nonsensical jabbering as if it was the most profound oration he’d ever heard. He found delight in watching her command the stuffed wildlife in the lobby. He patiently helped her slip on her parka and Sorel’s to go home. Maddy obviously had princess status in his book. 

This bothered me. What am I not seeing in this little girl that he sees?

 

At last, the answer came. Maddy’s father understood her because he loved her. One afternoon, he remarked that he had been working on playing a pitch and then asking her to match it with her voice. My fizzled light bulb flared: if nothing else, she can sing! 

I was the one who needed to change. Conventional books and methods of teaching wouldn’t work with Maddy, so I crossed boundaries. I used her fantasies to conjure up piano games. Together we sang phrases, over and over, until she saw the relationship between pressing a key and reward of a responding pitch. Lessons started to stretch into 20 minutes.

And this week, she did it. Maddy, the girl buried in a fog of ADHD, played and sang a simple melody without any help. Those 9 notes were some of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard. 

I’m glad our heavenly Father does not expect perfection and performance from His children. As His creative masterpiece, we have inherent value to Him. He gave us our abilities as well as our limitations. He has made all of us unique. I should never de-value a person because he or she is different or slow to make progress in my eyes. 

Observing my student’s father added a new dimension to Psalm 103:13, “As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him.” Think about it: we are incredibly slow to learn, yet He is always patient. We ignore Him, yet He is “kind to the unthankful and the evil” (Luke 6:35)—so kind, in fact, that He sacrificed His own blameless Son to redeem us, His rebellious creations. He offers this redemption as a gift, purely on the basis of grace. And once you or I take this by faith, we are “accepted in the beloved” (Ephesians 1:7). Nothing can change that status. Nothing.