The things your parents wouldn't keep you from doing.

Sometimes it seems like everyone has a story of the things their parents wouldn't let them do as a child, the ones that were formative experiences that led them to where they are today. Maybe they made you play the piano, or prevented you from playing the piano, or kept you from football or ceramics or whatever, for reasons that I'm sure seemed good to them at the time but had an outsized impact on your life.

I don't have any of those stories because my parents weren't like that at all. If I was interested in something they pretty much moved heaven and earth to make it happen. Or rather, if I was interested in something and actually told them about it.

That's really what I'm interested in today: what was the thing you wanted to do as a kid, and probably could have done, except that you never expressed it?

^{Photo by Kelly Martin, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

For me, one of the key things is mallet percussion. I adored xylophones, vibraphones, and glockenspiels as a kid, and played them every chance I could get, but that was always in school. I got pretty good at them, for a fourth-grader. Mostly vibraphones; I like the extra rebound from the metal keys, it makes the rhythm work better for me.

But then I stopped. It turns out there aren't vibraphones sitting around everywhere for you to play with when you're a teenager and an adult, and for whatever reason I never had the thought that this was something I could get one of for myself and pursue seriously. I don't know that I encountered a professional mallet percussionist until my late teens, so they may have just stuck in my head as toys that were like all of the other toys. There's kind of a spectrum of seriousness among elementary-school percussion instruments, and vibraphones are pretty much the top; if I was thinking of them in the same category as maracas and the fish-shaped güiro it's no surprise I never thought of them as a serious path. (I know there are professional percussionists who use those, but not as a primary instrument.)

As an adult, I suspect my parents are reading about this for the first time right now. There were times when I was a teenager where I'm pretty sure they would have bought me eight concert xylophones if it meant there was a nonzero chance I wouldn't spend the rest of my life living in their basement. That ended up working out in its own way, fortunately for everyone.

I've never gotten back to playing, though I've still had an affinity for other mallet percussionists' work. I've picked up several other instruments as an adult, and thought about going that direction, but for whatever reason never got there.

This isn't a post to announce that's changing, at least immediately, but as I'm spending more time and energy on music the desire is growing. If my cash flow ends up in decent shape this may end up being a winter project.

But I'd like to know about you. Was there something you wanted to do as a kid that you missed out on, not because of opposition, but because you never told anyone? Have you been able to find it again as an adult? If not, do you want to?

And on a second level, for the parents out there: do you have techniques for getting a handle on what your kids might miss out on for this reason? I don't have children of my own but my godson is pretty much a miniature version of me, so I'd like to know.