When You’re Not the Parent but You’re the One Who Sees It: A Teacher’s Venting Into the Void
The parking lot behind my studio was empty at 7:30 on a Tuesday night. I sat in my car with the engine off, staring at a flickering streetlight, and said out loud, “I don’t know what else to do with him.” Nobody was there to hear it. That’s the void—the place where I drop sentences I’ll never say to his mother, questions I can’t answer, and a slow, hissing kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with physical tiredness.
The him is Marcus, seven years old, a piano student who started lessons last fall. He’s not a difficult kid. He’s not the one who hides under the bench or throws pencils. He’s the one who sits very straight and very still, waiting for me to give an instruction he expects to fail at. This particular Tuesday, he’d come in with red eyes. His mother had said, “He didn’t want to come today,” and gave a little eye roll. She meant it as a small adult apology, a shared joke about children. I smiled and closed the door.
Marcus played the wrong opening note three times. Then he put his hands in his lap and said, “I’m not good at this.” His voice wasn’t whiny. It was flat, like a weather report. I said something cheerful—I’ve forgotten exactly what, something about practice and patience—and he nodded, then picked his left hand back up and missed again. That’s when the tears came. Not big sobs. One drip, then another, hitting the white keys. He didn’t wipe them. He just waited.
I’m not his parent. I don’t get to decide whether he has dessert or goes to bed at eight. I can’t step in when the school day goes wrong or when his mom spends the whole hour in the waiting room watching loud videos on her phone. I’m just the person who stands next to him with a metronome and a stack of beginner sheet music, watching him try and fail and then hate himself for trying again. That’s a strange place to stand.
So I vent. Into the void. I do it in the car after lessons, or while washing my coffee mug. I text a friend who hardly ever responds. Sometimes I write an angry paragraph in a notes app and delete it without reading it back. I call it venting because I don’t know what else to call it. It’s not a conversation. There’s no listener. But the funny thing is, I don’t actually need a listener. The void never talks back, which means I can finish my sentences.
One night, after the Tuesday with the tears, I sat in the same parking lot and said, “He just needs to do one thing right.” That was it. That was the whole complaint. It wasn’t about his mother. It wasn’t about whether I’m a good teacher. It was a small sentence that seemed too obvious to say out loud, yet I hadn’t really heard it until I said it to no one.
So the next lesson, I tried something different. When Marcus opened the book and froze, I didn’t say, “Let’s try again” or “You can do this.” I said, “Forget the whole song. Just find the first G with your left hand.” He looked confused. Then he looked at the keyboard, then at the page, then back. He found it. I said, “Good. Now just wait. What comes next?” He played the second note. Then the third. We made it through the entire first line before he even had time to remember he was going to fail.
That’s the part I can control. I can’t change the fact that his mother has him in three activities and a reading tutor. I can’t make his dad come to recitals. I can’t erase the school test he failed on Monday. But I can shrink the task down until it fits exactly where he is at that moment. Not where I wish he was. Not where the book says he should be. Right there, with one note.
This isn’t a grand teaching philosophy. It’s just something I learned from talking to nobody. Venting into the void is how I find out what I think. And once I know what I think, I can act like a person instead of a pressure machine.
Parents, here’s what I want to tell you. If your kid has any other adult in their life—a coach, a tutor, an aunt, a babysitter—that person is probably carrying around a version of my story. We are not you. We don’t carry the same hope or the same guilt. We don’t wake up in the middle of the night wondering if we’re ruining their future. But we do see things you can’t see, because we’re the person standing next to them, not the one looking at them across the kitchen table. When we tell you something hard—“He says he’s not good at this” or “She wants to quit” or “He cries in the car afterward”—it’s not an accusation. It’s our helplessness, speaking.
The next time a teacher or coach shares something difficult, try asking one question: “What helps them in the moment?” That’s all. Don’t ask “Are you sure?” (yes, we are) and don’t say “He doesn’t act like that at home” (of course he doesn’t). Just ask what helps. You don’t have to take our advice. You just have to let us know we’re on the same team.
I still vent. Some weeks have more material than others. Marcus still has bad lessons—last week he spent ten minutes hiding under his hands because I asked him to play a new song and he saw the splashy intro and decided the whole thing was impossible. But he also said, after I made him just find the melody’s starting note, “Can I try it again?” He didn’t get it perfect. He didn’t need to. The void didn’t hear any of it. But I did.
And that, honestly, is enough for now.
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