Singing in a choir

I was in the local United Church junior choir for a couple of years when I was young.  I could take it or leave it. (I enjoy singing more today.)

When I was in Grade Six, I missed a lot of school.  My parents didn't mind, but the teacher wasn't happy and spoke to me about it.  If I promised to stop missing school, I'd soon be breaking the promise and that would mean trouble, but if I said I'd continue it that would mean trouble right away.  So all I could do was say nothing and stare blankly.  He actually got my hearing tested! (It was perfect.)

But he did get to me, and in June I made a resolution to myself that in this last month I'd have perfect attendance.  I actually went to Sports Day, even though I knew I was going to hate it and I did.  But in the end it was no use:  I had to miss another day.

I should mention that if I went anywhere outside on a day when I'd missed school and any of my classmates saw me, they'd make an issue of it sooner or later.  Sure, it was none of their business, but it did get to me, and I got anxious not go anywhere on days when I'd been absent.

Now on the night of this June day I'd missed, we had choir practice.  It's true that this was the last rehearsal before the year-end concert, but it wasn't like I was doing a solo.  A lot of kids were in both the choir and my class, and I did not want to expose myself to their gleeful critiques.

One of my sisters said, "I think Jamie should go to choir practice anyway." (She was thirteen and I was eleven, and she'd got to the stage where she decided she knew everything about what was best for me better than I did.) So my parents started putting pressure on me to go.  It was finally my other sister who tipped the balance, and I went.

When I was at choir practice, Ann didn't lose any time saying, "Why weren't you in school, Jamie?" If that had been the only thing it wouldn't have mattered.  But she blabbed around about it, of course, and the next day at recess I had to deal with other kids making an issue of it.  I could not deal with this at all.  I ended up saying "Look, I just couldn't miss it!" which of course didn't do any good:  they wanted their pound of flesh.  I picked a sliver out of wooden plank and felt really, really stupid.  I knew what the consequences would be, but I took the path of least resistance and walked into it anyway.  And for what?

I'm still a bit resentful today.  It wasn't like my relatives were pressuring me into this to benefit themselves. (That's just the way of the world.) But they thought this was for my own good!  If there were consequences that I wanted to avoid, that just proved I was too sensitive.  It was bad enough that when people were deliberately nasty to me I was expected to act as if it didn't hurt me and call that a solution.  But now I was supposed to make decisions beforehand as if the nastiness I faced wasn't going to hurt me!  I wish I could have lived in two different worlds and gone or not gone to one regardless of the other, but these worlds did overlap and I couldn't just ignore that there'd be consequences I couldn't deal with.