How my teacher handled my crushed dream in 1994 (and why it still matters)
The list went up on the school notice board at 8:15 on a Tuesday in May 1994. I remember the exact texture of the paper—rough, the color of weak tea, held by four yellowed thumbtacks. Nineteen names were typed in a neat column. The twentieth spot, the last forward position on the district soccer team, had been mine for months. Except when I pressed my face close to the glass, squinting through my own reflection, that twentieth spot belonged to a boy named Marcus. Not me.
I didn’t cry right then. I think I was too disoriented, the way you are when you fall down stairs and land on your feet. I just kept reading my name over again, as if the letters might rearrange themselves. Then the 8:25 bell rang, and everyone moved, and my body moved with them, and I didn’t talk to anyone until lunch.
When I got home, my mom asked how it went. I told her. She put down the wooden spoon she was using to stir rice and came around the table. She didn’t say, “You’ll get them next time” or “That coach is an idiot.” She just put her hand on my shoulder and stood there with me. We stayed like that for about thirty seconds, then she said, “Dinner’s in twenty minutes. If you want to go shoot hoops before, you should.”
I went out back and kicked a ball against the fence for a while. It was a relief to hit something.
My dad got home from work around six. My mom had already filled him in, because he didn’t ask. He did something even better. He sat across from me at the kitchen table, and he shrugged, and said, “I tried out for the school play in ninth grade. They gave me the part of a tree. A tree that didn’t move. I walked out of the auditorium and never auditioned again.” Then he bit into a piece of bread and said, “I probably should’ve tried a different play instead of giving up.” That was all.
But the real lesson didn’t come until the next day, in fifth-period language arts.
Mrs. Abernathy was not a warm person. She wore turtlenecks in June and had a way of looking at us over her glasses that suggested we were mildly disappointing her just by existing. She was also my favorite teacher of all time. After the bell rang on Wednesday, she said, “Sarah, could you stay a minute?”
I stayed. The room smelled like pencil shavings and the orange she always ate at 9:00 sharp. She waited until the last kid cleared the doorway, then she closed the door and sat on the edge of her desk.
“I heard you didn’t make the soccer team,” she said. Not a question.
I nodded.
She took off her glasses and cleaned them with her sleeve. Then she said something I’ve never forgotten. “You know, I was thirty-eight years old before I understood what it means to want something and not get it. To want it so badly that you feel it in your teeth. That’s called desire. And most children never get to feel it until something like this happens.” She looked directly at me. “The coach didn’t take your dream away. He showed you it existed. The dream is still yours. You just have to find a different field to play it on.”
I didn’t fully understand her then. I do now.
For years, I stored that moment in a box labeled “Things That Helped.” But as my own kids stumbled through their first real disappointments, I started unpacking it. I’ve come to understand that Mrs. Abernathy did something most of us don’t do well as parents or teachers. She neither dismissed my grief nor inflated it. She didn’t rush me to another activity. She didn’t say “Everything happens for a reason.” She treated my disappointment as a legitimate, adult-sized emotion, but she also gave me a way to hold it without drowning in it.
That’s hard to do on the ground, in real time. When your daughter doesn’t get the lead in the spring musical, or your son is cut from the baseball team, the instinct is to either fix it fast (“Let’s sign you up for a different league!”) or make it bigger (“That coach has no idea how talented you are!”). Both are attempts to ease our own discomfort. The first one says, “I can’t handle your sadness.” The second says, “I can’t handle the unfairness of the world.” Neither lets the kid actually sit with what just happened.
The phrase that changed me in 1994 was “The dream is still yours.” Not “The dream still exists” or “You still have potential.” She was saying: the dream of playing soccer, of being on that team, of using your body to move a ball into a net—that doesn’t go away because some adult made a list. The specific opportunity was gone. The desire was still my property.
I’ve adopted a version of this for parenting. When my son, Theo, didn’t get selected for the school band percussion section last year, we sat on the couch and he said he hated the band teacher and hoped her car didn’t start. That was fine. Let him say it. Then I said, “You still love drumming, right? That’s separate.” He nodded. “So what do you want to do with that?” He shrugged. I didn’t push. A week later he found a cardboard box and started drumming on it. Two weeks later he asked if he could take drum lessons at a community center downtown. He’s been playing ever since. He still doesn’t sit in the band room, but he plays in our garage with a friend every Saturday.
That was the other thing Mrs. Abernathy did. She didn’t tell me to try harder or to “go out there and show them.” She gave me space to find the next field myself. In the short term, that meant I kept playing soccer in the park with my neighborhood friends. I didn’t join another league. But the love of the game didn’t die. It just got less formal. Eventually, in high school, I did try out again for a team, and I made it. But that’s not really the point.
The point is that children can handle a crushed dream. What they can’t handle is adults who pretend it wasn’t real, or who promise to build them a new dream before they’ve had a chance to grieve the broken one.
A few actionable things that actually work, based on moments that worked for me and for other parents I’ve talked to:
First, say the plain reality out loud. “You didn’t make the team.” Don’t soften it with “But you did your best!” The kid already knows they didn’t make it. Hearing an adult confirm it, without panic, is strangely calming.
Second, ask a question that points forward but doesn’t demand an answer. “What do you think you want to do now?” Leave a long silence. If they say “I don’t know,” say “Okay. That’s fine.” Don’t bring out your list of alternatives. Let the not-knowing exist.
Third, teach them to separate the rejection from the love of the thing. The direct sentence I use now is, “The part, the team, the grade—that’s external. Your interest in drawing, playing piano, building forts—that’s internal. No one can cut that.”
Fourth, parents, watch what you say in front of your kids about your own failed attempts. Not as a performance (“Look how well I recovered!”) but as a simple fact. When I told my kids about the time I didn’t get a job I really wanted in 2011, I didn’t frame it as a growth story. I just said, “I was sad for about eighteen hours, and then I had a long shower and thought about all the other things I might do. It didn’t feel good. But it passed.”
That word—”passed”—matters more than anything.
I still think about Mrs. Abernathy’s orange and the way the late-afternoon light hit the chalkboard dust when she said the part about desire. It took me a long time to realize she wasn’t talking only about soccer. She was talking about the difference between having a dream and being consumed by a dream. The coach’s list didn’t crush my desire—it just redirected it. And sometimes that’s all we can do for the small people we’re raising. Not protect them from the list, but stand beside them while they read it, and then wait, and wait a little longer, until they decide what to do with the wanting.
Theo didn’t make the percussion section this year either. He tried again, which itself felt like a small miracle. He came home and said, “Still didn’t get in.” I said, “Okay. You still drumming?” He said, “Yeah. I’m teaching myself a song from that video game.” I said, “Good.” Then we made tacos.
I don’t know if he’ll ever sit in that band room. He might not. But the dream of playing music isn’t tied to that room anymore, and that turns out to be a far more durable kind of dream. It bends, but it doesn’t break.
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