I am not yet even close to Jennifer Weiner’s level after two years of one hour a week lessons, but I know the feeling (and the 15 year old).

I open my book to Chopin’s waltz in D flat major, the “Minute Waltz,” so called because you’re meant to play it in under a minute. Right now, I’m averaging around five. As I start the first trill my 15-year-old daughter, who these days speaks mostly in sarcasm, strolls by. Sometimes she’ll do a mocking balletic leap as I play, or just emphatically shut her bedroom door. Tonight, she does neither. “Hey, Mom,” she says, “that was really good!”It wasn’t. It was just O.K. But that is good enough.

The opinion piece is here.