When I was twelve years old I lived in fear that someone would ask me what my favorite Ted Nugent song was. It's funny now, but back then I spent so much time worrying about what other people were thinking and what they might do that I missed about half of my childhood.

At the time my only concert shirt was a hand me down from one of my sisters. It was black and by the time I took such a great liking to it, the shirt was beginning to fray at the edges. There was an expanding hole under one armpit. My parents loathed it which must account for why I was so drawn to it. Of course if you opened up my closet door now and inspected my wardrobe you would see that I still have a great affinity for black concert shirts and if you examined even further you would notice that I have many that sport holes of various sizes, some many decades old and the best are so soft and thin that it is a stretch of the imagination to call them shirts. A few of them I keep in the back of the closet knowing that I can't even wear them anymore, but I can't get rid of them either. My husband likes to tell me that when I drop off food at the food bank, they often must think I am a client. I stopped caring about what other people thought decades ago, so I can see the humor in that, but at twelve I spent hours thinking about how I could evade any conversation that began with, "So, what is YOUR favorite Nugent song?" This was 1981, decades before the Internet as we all know it, before You tube and MTV, even Friday Night videos were a few years away and the closest Tower Records was miles away from my neighborhood, so it wasn't like I stood much a chance to memorize the names of Ted Nugents songs anyway. Looking back on it now, I can see that I was way too hard on myself back then.

Seventh grade is what we send people to in order to prepare them to enter the military and go off to war. It was lumpy meanness and blight. Even the few kids who were basically nice human beings were a little off back then and the rest of us turned into bullies in order to distract everyone else from turning on us. It is an ugly truth. We couldn't comprehend that we still had the land mines of puberty and the unsettling adventures of first love. Twelve year olds live in the moment, which I am sure is mostly a good thing or it would all have been worse.

All of this has been weighing heavily on my mind because my middle daughter just turned ten this month and I am already anxious about what seventh grade will do to her. Out of my three daughters, she is most like me. My little towheaded, blue eyed girl who escapes into her drawings. I watch her excel in the arts while struggling with math and numbers and I see how she already keeps a long mental list of things that she can lie awake at night worrying about. Apparently she also inherited my tendency towards nervousness and anxiety. I wish I could have spared her that too.

I have to remind myself that the flip side of my own personal neurosis is that throughout all of it, I do mostly maintain cheerfulness. It is something I cultivate and draw from on an ongoing basis, always have, even back in those dark middle school years when I worried myself to death. I always kept a handful of optimism and she will too.

And just in case, I will always be there to listen. I may even share a shirt.