The phrase performance anxiety has a special meaning for my husband and me.  For us, the term refers to the cold sweat that covers us whenever our middle son takes to the stage or playing field.  We don’t worry whether he’ll shine in the spotlight or excel in a game.  Rather, we just hope for a catastrophe-free performance of whatever it is he’s doing.

For the past twenty-odd years, we’ve watched Eric give piano recitals, sing, dance, and act in theatrical productions and play various sports.  No matter what, Eric exudes confidence and enthusiasm for the enterprise before him.  However, watching him perform is like being blindfolded on an enormous roller coaster ride.  It’s fun.  It’s exciting.  But it’s also terrifying because you never know how the ride will end.

When Eric was nine, he had a piano teacher who ran a tight ship.  She would coach the parents and students ahead of recitals, “No coughing or sneezing, and no flash photography.”

At one memorable recital, Eric had to play two pieces.  Totally at ease, he smiled at the audience, then sat at the piano.  He plunged into the classical song, making it to the end without major mishap.  We exhaled.

As it turned out, we exhaled too soon.  Next, he started in on Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer.  Eric tended to play this piece faster and faster until it degenerated into a whirling dervish of frenzied sound.  At home, in order to hold him back, we forced Eric to practice with a metronome.

But on stage, Eric let restraint fly to the wind.  By the middle of the song, his fingers approached the speed of light.  Of course, it is a basic principle of physics that the speed of sound cannot keep up with the speed of light.  For a full three minutes, musical chaos ensued.

At this point, a normal child might have panicked or might have been paralyzed by embarrassment.  Not Eric.  He kept grinning and nodding to the audience, fully enjoying his improvisational journey.

I sneaked a glance around the room.  Usually, when a kid flubs up on stage, parents paste a frozen smile onto their faces.  Not these folks.  Everyone was grinning right back.  We had a regular love fest going on.

Miraculously, Eric discovered the last few measures of Joplin’s original melody line and ended with an enthusiastic flourish.  Then, the child bowed so low, we thought the he’d tip right over.  The audience responded with high-energy applause.

After the recital, we congratulated Eric.  I didn’t mention his melodic wandering.  My goal was for him to have a non-traumatic recital experience, which he did.  Let the teacher handle quality control.

Eric’s response to our congratulations was “Yeah.  That went great.  I got a little lost during The Entertainer.  But nobody knows that song anyway.”

When he was in fifth grade, Eric’s elementary school decided to perform The Pirates of Penzance, quite a theatrical challenge for children.  Assigned the part of the Major-General, ten-year-old Eric spent hours listening to the Linda Ronstadt/Kevin Kline production of the operetta.  In his sleep, he’d sing, “I am the very model of a modern Major-General, I’ve information vegetable, animal and mineral…”

Not having a Gilbert and Sullivan mini-orchestra on hand, the elementary school used canned music to back up their singers.  As he practiced the song, most of Eric’s effort was directed toward singing it fast enough.  He struggled to fit in all those long words in such short musical spaces.

The night of the performance, Eric raced for the finish line.  He belted out all the lyrics of the piece a full four measures before the canned music ended.  Then, with a look of pure victory, he bowed to the audience.

A few years later, Eric’s piano teacher (a different one by now) scheduled a recital in a fancy retirement community.  There were chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, pretty murals on the wall and a thick rose-colored rug covering the floor.  Elderly residents and family members of the young musicians made up the audience.

Eric planned to perform a lengthy and complex sonatina.  He began pounding away, giving those keys a workout.  In fact, he was pure hell on that piano.

About midway into the sonatina, Eric’s fingering seemed weird.  He looked as if he were doing a Chico Marx imitation of piano playing.  You know Chico–he’s the Marx brother who used his thumb and pinkie to pick out fancy riffs on the piano.

By the end of the piece, I noticed a horrified look on his piano teacher’s face.  Playing so hard, Eric had cut his finger on what must have been a chipped key.  Blood dripped all over the keyboard and down onto that nice rose-colored rug.  The accident didn’t faze Eric one bit.  He just gave a slight bow and raised his bloody hand in the air, as if he were a prizefighter.

You may wonder, what kind of child needs a haz-mat crew to clean up body fluids after a piano recital?  The kind of child who visits the emergency room seven times in thirteen months with sports accidents.  That kind of child.

I’ll spare you the details regarding those mishaps.  I’ll just tell you about the very last one when Eric lacerated his scalp playing paintball.  He walked into the house a bloody mess.  We knew we had to take him to the hospital, we couldn’t bear the thought of seeing all those familiar ER faces a seventh time in one year.  So, instead, we drove to a community hospital in another part of town where they used eight staples to repair his scalp.

We thought the paintball accident might deter Eric, but no.  Just after he started attending University of Virginia, he also signed on to a professional paintball team based in San Diego, California.  So, for most of his college years, he spent Tuesdays through Thursdays in class in Charlottesville.  Then, at least twice each month, he traveled (Thursday through Mondays) with his team all over the country and all over the world (Spain, Puerto Rico, Australia). I am a staunch pacifist and my husband is an eye surgeon.  So as you may imagine, it’s taken us a while to adjust to the irony of Eric’s career choice.

Now, Eric lives in New York City and works for a sports company.  On weekends, he plays on a professional paint ball team based out of Baltimore. Is our worrisome, thrilling and fun-filled roller coaster ride over?  Probably not.

I guess parenting never ends.  Lately, I’ve been having visions of my husband and me in our nineties, cheering for seventy-year-old Eric during his golf game, all the while wondering whether he’s going to find a way to injure himself or create a spectacle.  But really, I can’t think of anything else we’d rather be doing.