I really really wish I could say that.
It's more personal than that, though, because yes, we depend on his input, but also because of the amount of time and effort we've put in over the last 2¼ years, if he left to go somewhere else it would feel so deflating.
but she says that she tells him he has to make this commitment, that commitment, but then he finds another thing that he wants to do and everything is dropped so he can do it. to the end where he's got about 8 different activities on the go, and we're the first thing to be dropped because, i don't know, we're the most lenient? or we're more likely to welcome him back? or because we were the first thing he committed to? I don't know - he's always saying that he wants to stay at St M's. His mum said that she gave him the choice last month and he said he wanted to stay here.
It doesn't help that this play he's doing that takes up Friday night is only until May, so we've agreed to wait for him, but we did say we expected Sunday mornings, but so far, he's not attended a single one, and a couple of the reasons have been that he's been out to other things on Saturday nights (concerts, choirs etc that he's performing in) and he's too tired to get up on a sunday morning for us.
he still expects to be allowed to sing Once in Royal solo at 9 lessons and carols, but he's seemingly unwilling to commit himself to coming round to ours, or to the church for half an hour here and there during the week to practise choir stuff.
then his mum goes "well, we don't want to put you out" - if we were bothered about that, we wouldn't offer in the first place!
but he's got something on every single night of the week (and now on Sunday afternoons too, yet another play).
I don't even know if he'll be at the Advent carol Service this week - one of our biggest services of the year, because of this other Sunday thing.
the hardest thing about the whole situation is that he's an incredibly talented musician, (insofar as learning and picking up stuff easily and ability), so it's really hard to say "if you don't come to rehearsals you can't do xyz" because he picks stuff up ever so quickly when he does finally turn up.
We've already banned him from evensong because he won't stay for the adults' practise on evensong weeks and he won't put the time and effort in to learn the music. Of course, then we're met with "NTC has invited him to sing evensong every month because they cover that in the practices he attends"