Say that mother was excited about your recitals this week and attended them. Say she even took a few steps to promote your recitals a bit on social media.
Say that, a day after these events, you write her a thank you message, both for attending and for those small gestures of promoting. And then she writes you back on how you promoted your recital all wrong (read: in a basically non-existent way) and offering her services for the future, since she has a masters in Publicity and has worked at local newspapers and TV channels.
Say you tell her about the next recital you'll have with an ensemble (more because some of it will hinder the piano lessons at school with her kid) and she becomes determined to get it promoted grand scale, even though it's a contemporary classical programme with both beautiful but also nasty pieces that will likely intrigue or alienate, depending on the audience (but percentage-wise, probably more towards the latter). But no, to her sheer promotion trumps every other factor.
Say you then spend an entire evening of conversations on Messenger with her, in which she hits you with every idea and strategy conceivable: emails to be sent to TV hosts, posters, FB pages for both you and your ensemble, photoshoots of you and/or the ensemble, DVD recordings of you to send for the interviews, ideas on how to profile you on social media or TV, ways to start sharing the event already, profiling every ensemble member in individual FB statuses, write daily updates on the event page...
Say you send her an email with the details and presentation of the event, but ask her to hold on until tomorrow, in order to double-check some things, only for her to reply, minutes later, that she sent it to three different TV hosts.
Say you make it clear that you don't want the interviews to be only with you and about you, since this is a team/ensemble effort, but she keeps phrasing it in her replies about you getting interviewed and the producers having material with you to use, in ways that it's not entirely sure whether she got the message or not.
Say she'd like everyone solved by tomorrow morning already, when you can barely offer incomplete details and the rest of your ensemble is nowhere to be contacted, in real time. I mean, it's only bloody Maundy Thursday, a day before legal holidays, right?
Say much of this is well intentioned and potentially highly welcomed support, considering you can barely wake up on your own in the morning and cook an omelette, let alone do something as mediatize your career events (
), but that this kind of dialogue and pressure can really get to you nonetheless.
I last had class with him on Monday, without him showing symptoms.
).