Christmas Pageant Update

[qos]

Here's the email I just sent:

Mom,

I don't want to spoil your plan, but I really do not want to sing, except with the whole family. With a couple of exceptions when I was very young, I have never -- unlike you and [RS]-- been a soloist, and I have not done any singing at all (except occasional bursts along with the iPod while alone in the car) in many years. Perhaps [RS] would like to sing "Angels from the Realms of Glory" or "Angels We Have Heard on High" or "Hark the Herald Angels Sing"? I would feel much more comfortable if my participation was sharing/alternating the readings with Dad.

For those of you who don't go back and check up on comments, I realized -- thanks in large part to queenofhalves and athenian_abroad (who actually *knows* my mother and the rest of my family)-- that a big part of what twitched me off about this was that Mom simply decided that she wanted to do this, and then handed out parts, followed by a comment that made disagreement very difficult. She did not ask how the rest of us felt about her idea, nor did she ask how we would like to participate.

I am not going to confront her about this four days before Christmas. This is not such a big issue to me that I would be seriously compromising myself or my integrity by going along with something that's important to her. There's a time and a place for asserting one's wishes and feelings, but there's also a time to accommodate someone you love and who has strong feelings about something. I'm trying to strike a happy medium here.

Maybe I'll talk with her about it after Christmas. I don't want to spoil it for her in retrospect, but I also don't want her to think that I was comfortable with the way she handled this.

If I'm lucky, my email will get the message across in a more subtle way.

Comments

[qos.livejournal.com]

because people don't get as defensive

That's what I'm hoping for. :-)