When a Parent’s Dream Gets in the Way: A Teacher’s Story About Being 10 in 1994
The kitchen table was covered in newspaper, and my father was drawing diagrams of violin strings with a black marker. It was October of 1994, and I was ten years old. He had just come home from a parent-teacher conference where my teacher mentioned, almost as an aside, that I had a natural ear for pitch and rhythm.
“We’re not going to waste this,” Dad said, not looking up from his schematic. He had played violin in high school but gave it up to go to trade school. “You’re going to learn properly. Radiant Promise Music School starts beginners every January. I already called.”
I didn’t want to play the violin. I wanted to finish the little mystery novel I had started writing in a spiral notebook. But when you are ten and your father is standing over the kitchen table with a drawn map of a future you didn’t ask for, you don’t really understand that you have options. You just understand that your endless hours of scribbling stories were probably a waste of time.
We bought a quarter-size violin from a pawn shop that smelled like cigarettes and old shoes. The case was duct-taped on one corner. My father, who could fix a carburetor with his eyes closed, replaced the tape with a neat metal bracket and polished the wood until it shone. He looked so satisfied that I felt guilty for the sinking feeling in my stomach.
Lessons started in January. It was a ten-minute drive every Tuesday after school, past the plumbing supply store and the dairy farm. Inside the studio, a woman with very straight hair and very sharp shoulder pads named Mrs. Hartford would tap her foot and say, “Again” until my fingers ached.
For five months, I practiced every afternoon. Dad built a small stand in the garage so I could play with the door open during good weather. He’d sit on the overturned milk crate, listening with his eyes closed, nodding slowly at the parts that sounded okay. Sometimes he’d say, “You’re coming along. You’re really coming along.”
The thing is, I wasn’t. I was fine, maybe even decent, but there was no joy in it. I did it because the alternative made Dad quiet and disappointed in a way that filled our small house like fog. My novel fanned out in drafts on my bedroom floor, and I edited exactly none of them.
The dream was supposed to be mine. That’s the strange thing about parental dreams—they wrap themselves up in the language of opportunity and hard work, and they feel so noble that you can’t find a clean, clear place to say, “I don’t want this.”
The crushing part didn’t happen in a dramatic way. There was no big performance, no meltdown, no screaming match. It happened on a Tuesday afternoon in May, when the school music teacher handed out permission slips for the district young musicians showcase. “Only motivated students,” the flyer said, and she had circled my name.
That night, I sat at the dinner table and listened to my father tell my mother at length about how I’d play “Ode to Joy” and maybe the Pachelbel Canon and how people would see that I was special. I watched his hands move in the air, conducting the invisible orchestra of his expectations.
“Dad,” I said. My voice came out small and strange. “I made up a song last week. I wrote it down, on paper, like you do with music. It’s about the lake near Grandma’s house.”
He said, “That’s nice.” And then he went on talking about the showcase.
It wasn’t that he dismissed me. It was that he didn’t hear me. I had wanted him to see that I had my own ideas, my own way of expressing myself. Instead, he saw a version of me that didn’t exist. A version that loved the violin and wanted attention. I couldn’t be that version. I had tried for months, and hard as I worked, I simply wasn’t her.
I played at the showcase. I played carefully, accurately, and completely without feeling. The audience clapped. Dad cried a little, and I felt a particular kind of misery that comes from disappointing someone by giving them exactly what they asked for.
We quit later that summer. I finally told him I hated it, and he got very quiet and stopped talking about violins. He didn’t get angry. He just went outside and worked on the car for a long time, and I think some part of his dream died that day, too.
Now, twenty-eight years later, I am the teacher who sends home those permission slips. I stand in front of third graders, and I see the shadows in their eyes when their parents push them into things they didn’t choose. I also see the parents, well-meaning and tired, who just want their kids to have a little more than they had.
Here is what I have learned: adults cannot see the difference between a child who is interested and a child who is obedient. That distinction is the whole ballgame. An interested child practices even when no one is watching. An obedient child practices when the parent is watching. If a child only practices when the parent is in view, the dream belongs to the parent.
The guidance I now give is small and practical. When a parent tells me their kid loves soccer, I ask, “Does the child say they love it, or do you love watching them play?” I ask—nicely—what the child does when nobody’s looking. Do they pick up the football on their own, or do they need prompts? These are honest questions, not traps.
The biggest thing is to give a child room to quit in a low-stakes way. My dad never knew he could say, “Okay, let’s try something else for a while.” He thought quitting was failure. It isn’t. Trying something and finding it isn’t for you is just information. It is the most useful information a kid can give you.
Now I teach writing, and I look at the kids who hand in long, messy fantasies about dragons and spaceships. I see the parents who say, “They spend too much time on this. We need to get them into coding.” I don’t tell those parents they’re wrong. I just remind them that coding is a tool, while writing, or music, or drawing, is a place where a child can live without an audience.
I wrote my novel eventually. I actually wrote several. They’re ordinary, but they’re mine. And while my father will never fully understand why the violin didn’t work out, I have made peace with it.
Last month, my father called and asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I said I didn’t need anything. He said, “Well, I found that song you wrote about Grandma’s lake. The sheet music. It was in some papers in the garage. I don’t read music but I kept it.”
My throat closed up. I just said, “Thanks, Dad.”
And then we talked about the weather, which is what we do. He still doesn’t say the word “sorry,” and I still don’t say the word “quit.” But the piece of paper with my music on it is sitting in my office now, in a frame without a plaque. Maybe it took thirty years, but he sees it now. And some days, that feels like enough.
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