It's not often that I get on here and bitch about the parents of the kids I teach, but this has to be said.
Back in September, one of these kids' parents asked me to play for her wedding on Valentine's Day this year. We'd been kind of quietly coasting along with it, and then yesterday I get a phone call. (We'll call her P)
P: "So we need to get together to pick out music."
Me: "When were you thinking of?"
P: "I'm kind of following your lead, so let me know what's good for you..."
Me: "How about next week? That way I can bring (the other musician) along."
P: "Well, that won't work, because I'll be out of town-- we'll have to say the week after."
Me: "Sounds fine to me. What time...?"
P: "Well, the only problem I have with that is that it's kind of late in the game... and you have a tendency to have things come up-- you get sick or have car trouble, if you get my drift..."
Me: (?????????? WTF?) "Well, it looks like the only option..."
P: "Well, you understand my concern... if something happens and you don't show up, then we're up to the 29th..." etc.
Okay-- I have been teaching this woman's children for two and a half years. In that entire time I might have missed five lessons, three of which during the period that I was bed-ridden with the flu last year. WTF?? I could have killed her. I've also been a professional musician for ten years. To screw up a gig like that, especially a wedding, is a mortal sin.
Not to mention that I've put up with little remarks like that for the entirety of our working relationship. Apparently, she thinks that since I'm a musician, I can't be trusted, and since I'm under 40, I have no idea what I'm talking about. (At one point this past year she had the gall to tell me I had "no idea of the way the world worked, and no concept of what things cost in real life." This from a woman who lives in a $500,000 two-bedroom cottage on less than a quarter of an acre, in the worst-congested area of DC and uses her beautiful antique Steinway, which hasn't been tuned or serviced in a coon's age, as a picture shelf.)
So today I called her back and quit the works. No more teaching, no more wedding. If she's going to be that way, then who needs her. I hate parents who say shit like that. Teaching is my job. I Don't just wake up on a given day and say, "Hmmm... I think I'll flake out on my students today. I'll tell them I'm sick." If I miss coming to a lesson, wither I'm in dire straits or deathly ill and don't want the kids to catch it. (With woodwinds, it's easy to share the love, so I take no chances.) I'm not the maid. I went to school for as long, or longer than most lawyers and some doctors. I'm not your servant-- I don't take orders.
I basically told her she'd crossed a line with that, and that I'm done. Stick a fork in me.
