My Story (age thirteen, 1986) I vividly remember being thirteen years old and the new girl in eighth grade. It was 1986 in Princeton, New Jersey. I was an only child and I had just transferred back to public school after several years as a student in a fancy private school. My mother had remarried the year before, and the additional income my new stepfather brought to the table put us somewhere between losing my need-based scholarship and being able to afford the full tuition. I spent most of my time alone. I didn''t really belong with my more affluent peers but seemed to have little in common with the kids in my neighborhood, many of whom I didn''t even know. That meant a fresh start for eighth grade in a public school near my dad and stepmother''s house. While that prospect was scary, I was ready for it.

Switching schools was going to open doors and allow me to reinvent myself. I was awkward and wore the wrong clothes. I was (or had been) the scholarship kid, and everyone knew it. And if that wasn''t enough, I was a blurter. I may have been an ADHD kid, but back then teachers just told my mother that I was a daydreamer who couldn''t seem to work to her potential. I was easily distracted and would allow myself to wander into dreamy wormholes during class or at the lunch table, achieving Walter Mitty-like trances, where I would become almost completely unaware of my surroundings. And then I would blurt out something that reflected the reality in my head. I think we can all agree that is not a prescription for being cool in middle school.

I did not let my social awkwardness stop me, however. I had a picture of who I wanted to be at my new school, someone cool. Someone-dare I say it?-popular. Most of this mental picture was formed by the seventies-era sitcoms I watched over and over again after school. I could be cool, right? It was possible. Well, no, the actual cool kids let me know that wasn''t going to happen after about a week. The good news was, I met a friend who helped break that fall. She was the other new girl, and she was nice enough to overlook the fact that I was kind of a mess.

Things were awkward for me at home, with a new stepfather at one house and my stepmother newly pregnant at the other. Things were equally awkward at school because I had no idea how to get out of my own head and just be a person. Eventually I made a couple of nice friends, and it seemed as if I might survive the year and make it to high school. Now back in 1986 in my hometown, by the time you made it to middle school (fifth grade), you were basically feral by current parenting standards. We rode around town on our bikes, buying slices of pizza with change we scrounged up. We loitered in the town square. We went to the shopping center and walked around for hours. No adults really knew where we were or what we were doing.

Many, many things happened that parents seemed to know nothing about. By midyear, there was a contagious outbreak of falling in love. First one person would select another and let it be known that they liked them. The other person would often reciprocate the liking publicly, which was the start of being known as boyfriend and girlfriend. Within a couple of days, there was generally French-kissing, followed by proclamations of love. This all seemed to be the norm, at least from my perspective. When it was my turn to participate in this ritual, I was a little shocked by how horrible it felt. I don''t recall even liking the boy very much; I just remember being grateful that someone wanted to date me.

After a couple of weeks, though, I couldn''t take it. I wrote my friend a note about how I didn''t like him anymore and wished I could be done with it. I went on to describe how I would very much prefer to be dating a cooler, older, more popular boy, but sadly, he had a much-cooler-than-me girlfriend. I may have said something unkind about her, even though I recall her being a very nice person. My friend read the note in class, folded it up, and accidentally dropped it on the floor. It was picked up by another girl (whom I became friends with several years later), who saw her chance to do something dramatic and took it. She made lots of photocopies of that note, but first asked me to pay her ten dollars to delay passing them out around school. I suspected everyone already knew the contents of what I had written (they did) and also knew I couldn''t get my hands on ten dollars even if I sold my right kidney on the black market.

The next few weeks were a whirlwind of humiliation, near constant stomachaches, and cruel notes from classmates (some signed, some anonymous) telling me what an asshole I was and how much they wished I had never come to their school. I remember some of the notes told me I was a bitch and a slut. Some of them told me to go back to my old school-and then made fun of my family for being too poor to send me there. My clothes were mocked. My face and body were mocked. One person drew a very creative cartoon that depicted my death. My friend who dropped the note felt bad and did an admirable job of both standing by me and distancing herself from the nonsense. The boy I wanted to break up with was deeply embarrassed by the whole thing and never spoke to me again, which I deserved.

I lived in fear that his older sister would kick my ass, but she displayed remarkable restraint and just glared at me whenever I crossed her path. I went to school each day with my head down, feeling sick with anticipation at what people would say to me or what they were thinking as they stared at me. I went home each night knowing everyone hated me but never, ever disclosing a single thing to my parents. I watched too much TV, took a lot of naps, ate a lot of string cheese, and read ridiculous books that were easy to get lost in. I would try to recharge at home, hoping no one would ride their bike past my house or prank-call me. The calls would be a tip-off to my parents that something was going on. I was miserable, and I was not myself. I knew I had brought this on myself as a result of my poor judgment and unkind words, and that knowledge increased my shame and self-loathing.

I escaped into my head, imagining alternate endings to the story where I was cool and had friends, where things worked out okay. After a couple of very long weeks, it passed. By the time the eighth grade dance came around in June, there was plenty of other drama to supplant my pathetic note-writing. I got a dress and a date and felt immensely relieved to be out of the spotlight. While everyone remembered what had happened, no one seemed to care anymore. It had never felt so good to have nobody care about me. I had survived eighth grade. And Now that Awkward Eighth Grader Is a Mother The great irony of being a parent is that you get to relive the best and worst moments of growing up through your kids.

I recall so clearly how hard it was to be in middle school and high school, and now my kids are the same age. One of my personal challenges as a parent is to consciously stop projecting all my own bad decisions, experiences, and baggage onto my kids. They are not me. They will make all their own choices and all their own mistakes. And of course they live in a totally different world. Kids don''t write notes anymore-they text each other and send Snaps. As parents, we keep an eye on their Instagram feeds, lurking to see who is liking what and who is liking whom. We''re careful about what they watch, eat, and listen to.

We track our kids'' locations now, and always know where they are. We organize their social time and drive them to practice. Things are so different from when I grew up in the eighties that I started to question my own parenting choices and looked to books and the Internet for guidance. What I found was that no matter what choice you make about raising your kids, someone is going to have an opinion about it. Mommy Blogging and Parenting Norms My reaction to the unspoken rules and hard truths of modern parenting was to write about them. I''m one of the horrible mommy bloggers you''ve heard about. You would think I''d learned in eighth grade not to write down things that I might later regret, but apparently not. I''ve been writing about raising kids since 2009.

I''ve tried to be mindful of my children''s privacy along the way. I wrote about my kids through their baby, toddler, and preschool years, feeling comfortable that the universal joys and frustrations of early childhood were things that could be shared without hurting them later. As they got older, I began to struggle with the impact of writing about them at all. This mirrored their growing independence from me. Though it pained me to see them becoming big kids, and now tweens and teens, I knew it was the natural order of things-that I had to slowly start letting go of the small people who had once literally been a part of me. I began to focus more on my experiences dealing with the current culture of parenting. Sometimes the feedback was good, and sometimes I couldn''t bear to read the comments. At about the same time, I began working as an adjunct professor at a university nearby, teaching undergrads an overview course on public health.

That job was a game changer for me. It made me think in new ways, allowing concepts and ideas to click. I had to make complex information relatable, challenge my students when they didn''t want to be pushed, and support them in the classroom when things were going wrong. In short, it was a lot like parenting. Being a mother forces me to be a much better person than I''m naturally inclined to be. Being a teacher forces me to be a better thinker and to put myself in the shoes of the young adults I''m working with. It has given me an.