Do I smell freshly sharpened #2 pencils? While there is still plenty of summer left to enjoy, Back to School is looming just around the bend. For parents, a new school year comes with its own set of emotions and challenges, but as I watch my youngest work through the worries of what 1st grade may bring and my oldest try to think of any possible way to avoid leaving the relative comfort and safety of elementary school (“I’ve heard that some people just go straight from 6th grade to college!”), all of my own Back to Schools of decades past come flooding back as well.

Picture it: Sicily, 1922… (well… Seattle, 1987, but still…) After 7 years in the same nurturing environment, I was headed off to middle school with little more than my brand new set of braces, my yellow Sony Walkman® and the hope that my older siblings had not yet sullied the Brady name before I’d even had a chance to get my huarache sandal in the door. The butterflies in my stomach quieted a bit in the first class of the first day of 7th grade when I met Tori, a blonde whose ability to transform her bangs into a rock-solid, 6” tall fortress of hair is still baffling structural engineers to this day. Tori and I spent the better part of the next 6 years rolling our eyes and making terrible fashion choices together, while also learning a thing or two about life.

While fretting over having cool enough shoes and making a good first impression still exist for today’s kids, they also have the added fear of wondering if they’re safe when they walk through the doors of their schools. The emotions that come along with knowing that our kids are carrying this burden are nearly too much for my mama heart to bear. I wish that I had an answer to the questions that my kids ask about the grim and inescapable news that floods into their brains from the world at large, but I don’t. My greatest hope is that this changes. In the meantime, the things that I can confidently report having made it to the other side of K-12 education? 1. “Nerds” almost always become the “cool kids” once you’re an adult. 2. Acne can, unfortunately, still exist when you’re 42 years old.