What Happens When a Teacher Without Kids Needs to Vent
The last bell rang at 3:15, but I didn’t leave school until almost five. There was a parent conference that ran long, a stack of permission slips to sort, and the custodian flagged me about a sink that had been leaking for three days. By the time I got to my car, my shoulders were somewhere around my ears. I called my friend Dana on the drive like I always do when the day has left teeth marks.
I told her about the conference—how a mom spent twenty minutes explaining why her son couldn’t possibly have knocked another kid over, even though three classmates and an aide watched him do it. I told her about the sink and the art supplies budget that got cut again. I told her I was tired of holding everyone else’s patience together.
There was a pause. Then she said, in that careful voice people use when they’re trying to land something gently, “Well, it’s different when they’re your own. You’ll get it one day.”
I didn’t say anything. The light in front of me turned green and I didn’t move. Somebody honked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess you’re right.”
But that wasn’t why I called. I called because my day was heavy and I needed someone to just say, “that sounds like a lot.” Instead, I got a reminder that my exhaustion didn’t fully count. That I was just a placeholder, waiting for the real thing.
A few nights earlier, the group chat had gone quiet. I’d typed out a long message about a kid who bites—not an accident bite, a planned, targeted bite—and about how I was worried about him because his parents were in the middle of a divorce and he’d started hiding under tables during story time. I sent it at 9:30. Two people reacted with sad-face emojis. Someone changed the subject to a new preschool pickup routine. Nobody asked about him the next day.
I’m not a parent. I’ve been an early-childhood educator for nine years. I’ve had kids throw up on my shoes, call me “mommy” by accident, tell me that their dad’s new girlfriend is nice but her perfume smells like a burned candle. I’ve taught siblings and, once, the daughter of a girl I taught in my very first year. But because I go home to a quiet apartment and a calico cat who doesn’t care how my day went, the things I carry are somehow easier for people to drop.
There’s a common belief that you can’t truly know what it is to care for a child unless you’ve made one. And on some level, I get it. I don’t know what it’s like to be up at 2 AM with an infant who won’t latch, or what it does to a person to worry about one small human every single minute. I’m not claiming that. But I do know what it’s like to search a classroom of thirty kids for the one who’s quietly not okay. I do know the exact sound of a child trying not to cry in a hallway. I do know how to tell the difference between a kid who’s being difficult and a kid who’s drowning.
That’s not practice. That’s the job.
What’s been hard is learning how to survive the parts of the job nobody validates. Because when you’re a teacher without kids, the cultural script says your voice belongs at the children’s table. People smile. They say “you’ll understand when you have your own.” It comes from a good place, usually. But it erases the fact that I spend forty-plus hours a week with other people’s children, and that love and exhaustion do not split along biological lines.
The practical side of this has taken me years to figure out. Here’s what actually helps me now, none of which I found in any staff development meeting.
First, I have a venting buddy. One person, a coworker who also doesn’t have kids, and we have one rule: no fixing, no one-upping, no “you think that’s bad.” The phrase is “I need to get this out,” and the other person just listens. Sometimes the response is a single word: “heard.” That might sound small, but it’s better than any advice I’ve gotten about meditation or morning pages.
Second, I keep a running note on my phone called “brag and rage.” Two lists. The brag side is for things that went well—”kept my voice steady when the block tower fell on Marcus,” “got everyone through the fire drill without tears.” The rage side is everything else. I don’t re-read it. I type it out and close it. Something about the act of getting it out of my body and into a screen drains a little pressure off.
Third—and this one feels silly but it’s real—I stopped wearing my work shoes into my apartment. I changed my routine so the first thing I do at home is take them off at the door and wash my hands. It’s a tiny ritual, but it marks a physical boundary. The school day ends at the threshold. The worries don’t always respect it, but my body remembers.
The other part is what parents can do. If your child is in school or daycare, there’s a teacher or an aide in your life who probably doesn’t have kids. You might not think about it. From where you stand, their role is a mirror of your own worries: Is she eating? Is he happy? Is she the one biting? And that’s fine. We genuinely expect that. It’s part of our day.
But here’s a small thing that costs nothing: ask us how we are. Not “is my child okay”—that’s a different question. Just “how’s your day going?” And when we tell you, resist the urge to say “you’ll understand when you’re a parent.” Even if you mean it as a joke. We hear that sentence dozens of times a year, and it lands the same way every time, like the floor shifting slightly under our feet.
Also, acknowledging us by name—out loud, in front of your kid—goes a long way. “Say thanks to Ms. Evans before we leave.” That moment, where a parent treats you as a real person rather than a service provider, carries for a whole week. It doesn’t fix a hard day. But it makes the next one a little easier to show up for.
Dana and I still talk, though not as often. She still says things sometimes that make me want to hang up. I’ve stopped hoping she’ll understand the part of my life she can’t see. I have my venting buddy, my brag-and-rage doc, my shoes left at the door. It’s not a perfect system. Some evenings, I sit on the couch with the cat and feel the acre of quiet around me and wonder if any of it mattered.
And then Monday comes. A kid shuffles up to me with a rock from the playground, held out in a grubby palm. “It sparkled,” he says. “I thought you might like it.”
He doesn’t know anything about my venting or my void. He’s just handing me a rock because the day felt a little brighter with me in it.
That’s not a void. That’s the opposite of one. It just happens that nobody else is around to see it.
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