My mom would just get me lessons here and there, for as long as I was interested. Which usually wasn't very long. I was dreadfully handicapped by poor sight reading, and I remember complaining to one teacher after another, I can't sight read.. it's really hard for me to sight read... They never paid attention because somehow I showed up the next week knowing the music. But it made practicing so extremely difficult as I would spell out each note, locate it on the keyboard, try to fix it in memory, then look back and try to find the next note on the sheet music. I could keep this up for about a few months at a time, then would give up, start showing up at lessons saying "I didn't work on it... didn't get a chance to do this..." Then lessons would stop. It made me feel really bad. I remember times just staring despondently at the wall behind the piano and trying to gather up strength to go on with the next measure and wondering why I didn't have enough discipline to do this (which my mom said I lacked)... oh gosh it was just horrible discouragement. You couldn't just go on youtube to find out what something sounded like either. At 16, I poked at the first measures of the Rachmaninov prelude in G-minor op.23-5 and could not make heads or tails of what was going on, and that was the end of lessons. Forever. Or almost forever.
But I am so happy to be able to sight read better now, it is like whole vistas opening up, which I always felt were closed when I was a teenager!