Explaining confusion!

Tonight after a delicious supper, we had a rousing game of ..Mahjong! No..I guess it was not so rousing after all..I am not sure Mahjong could ever possibly be called rousing. It was fun to be playing a game after all the hard work of the day and the company of my son and daughter-in-law was most perfect but still hardly rousing! This was the first time Joanna had ever played the game so Mark and I proceeded to enlighten her as to the finer points of playing. We took the time to show her the game tiles. There were the "Circles"..pretty straightforward in deciding which those were..the "Bamboos"..again not the most difficult. So far, so good. She was catching on quickly. There were the "Characters"..ok, so now we are receiving the "this is not easy" look. Joanna is a very smart young lady, so I continued on..surely, I would not confuse her! And these are winds, dragons and flowers!..I received a slight look of desperation..still she was doing well. I pressed on with Mark chiming in whenever I would stumble (it has been years since I played this game). Now on to the possible "hands". Possible hands? What do you mean "hands"? How many are there? Well..I tried to sound positive at this point.."You are doing great! I am sure you will catch on quickly!" And besides we usually only play a few different hands like the Dragonfly or Knitting or maybe the NEWS Reel. There is Triple Knitting and always the "regular" hand. I am sure she was now thinking.."Just what have I gotten myself into here??" I started again to explain about Concealed Hands, Open Hands and the Great Wall of China! There was the "Twittering of the Birds" and even some "Goulash"..Goulash? (Don't ask!) I told her how you had to call the discard and whistle when you came to a corner. I told her about flowers and flower walls. I told her about Red, White and Green Dragons, I began to see by the look on her face that my explanation was not exactly "explaining" anything..all I was doing was creating more confusion. She was lost..lost in a sea of tiles. Somewhere, somehow, we decided to build our wall and start the game hoping that she would catch on by watching us..oh, was this a mistake! To start the game, you must "build" the "Great Wall of China"..no, no, no..not that big of a wall! This wall is built by stacking the game tiles two deep and lining them up to make a square. Oh, my! I asked my son to read in the instruction booklet to see how many tiles were in each wall.. and how many we each needed in our first "hand". He read..and then we built. He read wrong and we built wrong. Nothing was going right..poor Joanna..she was more confused than ever! For the entire first hand, we played with too few tiles..not good..it is hard to play if you start out wrong..we did! I was impressed with Joanna's determination to learn this game even though both of her teachers were not sure just how to play. I tried again to explain but managed to confuse us all. Then I had one of those "lightbulb" moments! Perhaps the aunt that gave us the game years ago, made up her own rules! Not too much of what I remember her teaching me is in the the rule book. Now that I think about it, this aunt was great about improvising when the situation called for it. I realized that our "rules" were made for pure entertainment and probably have no connection to Mahjong at all. No doubt, I totally confused Joanna with my explanation of the fundamentals of Mahjong..at least the fundamentals as I remember them! Through all of this..she remained the good sport..never getting frustrated..and beating both Mark and me in the first game! I figure that she must be really good at deciphering game rules all on her own since I cannot say she got a lot of help from me! All in all, it was a very enjoyable evening!