The last time I visited my parents’ home, my father kindly suggested that I consider taking back my childhood junk that had been sitting in their garage for more than two decades.

In fact, he had done me the great favor of sorting through a half-dozen boxes of sentimental scraps, pulling together the stuff he deemed most worthy of saving into two sturdy Home Depot boxes, and sealing them shut with what appeared to be a significant amount of packing tape.

Never let it be said that I can’t take a hint.

Since we were traveling by plane, I figured it made sense to mail the boxes back from Texas to Missouri. We loaded the boxes, which were filled with papers, books and photos, into the car and headed to the nearest post office. When we hoisted the box on the weight scale, I realized this would a pricey trip down memory lane. I asked the clerk if the boxes could be sent through the cheaper rate of media mail, which I had used before to ship books. It cut my shipping costs by more than half.

When she asked if I wanted to insure the items, I smiled and said no. What kind of value could I put on the complete set of school yearbooks from kindergarten through college? Or personal letters I’d saved from college or journals I’d kept while traveling through Egypt and Turkey when I studied abroad? The value of our life memorabilia doesn’t translate well to dollars.

I left the post office proud of the money I’d saved on this final act of adulting -- no longer using my parents’ garage as a storage facility. I was also more than a little curious about what I’d find when I opened those boxes and sifted through my dad’s collection of my elementary school report cards, artwork and school reports.

You can see where this is headed, can’t you?

Eight days later, an unfamiliar package arrived at my doorstep. It was much smaller than the box I had mailed, but the mailing address from the old box had been cut out and retaped on this one. Inside, there were some of my elementary school and college yearbooks and nothing else, except a letter from the United States Postal Service.

“During the processing of your package, the contents became unsecured and required rewrapping in order to forward it to its destination,” it said. If anything was missing, it suggested I send “an accurate and detailed description of each item” to the Atlanta Mail Recovery Center.

My heart sank. I wasn’t going to see any of that stuff again.

It wasn’t the first time I had lost a stash of cherished mementos. Lightning struck our home when I was in high school, and part of our home caught on fire. Letters I had saved from my grandfather and notes and cards and diaries from grade school and middle school turned to ash.

This time, more than the physical items, I mourned the loss of never knowing how my father had curated those memories, what he had saved for decades in hopes of passing on to me. I dreaded calling him with the news.

“I have some bad news,” I said. He took it worse than I did.

“It’s all your life work ... they threw it away?” he asked, incredulous. “This is unbelievable.”

He told me I needed to write to the postmaster general. Tell him your dad had saved everything from your elementary school drawings to the research you did in college, he said. “Things I felt like were important. ... It was so much stuff. I cannot imagine this.”

I told him not to be so upset. “Tell them you will gladly go into a warehouse in that center in Atlanta,” he told me. He wanted me to dig through whatever was stored there until I recovered my lost papers.

I wasn’t going to go to Atlanta.

Of course, then he started blaming himself.

“I shouldn’t have asked you to take it,” he said.

“It’s going to be all right, Dad. It’s OK,” I said.

“No, it’s not all right, and it’s not OK,” he said.

Sometimes it’s hard for parents to let go of their kids’ memories.

For a week, I kept that stack of surviving yearbooks on the kitchen counter, feeling a pinch in my heart when I thought about things I didn’t even know I would miss, until my husband moved them to the basement.

Two weeks later, Hurricane Harvey hit Texas. I watched my hometown sink under water.

Friends’ homes destroyed. My old high school flooded. Family members evacuated and rescued. Then Irma, Jose and Maria. Puerto Rico, where the vast majority of the residents still lack power and many have resorted to drinking contaminated water to survive.

Then the fires in Northern California. So much destruction, all it once, it seemed.

I kept coming back one of my favorite quotes: “All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on,” Henry Havelock Ellis wrote.

I was glad my husband had moved those old yearbooks.

Letting go.

Holding on.

Today’s middle schools are the training ground for tomorrow’s Harveys and Bills.

While more women and men are publicly speaking out about sexual harassment and assaults, many students don’t realize that what they face in hallways and classrooms often goes beyond bullying.

At least 1 in 4 middle schoolers say they’ve experienced unwanted verbal or physical sexual harassment at school, according to 2014 research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Girls as young as 12 have told me about boys who compare them to porn stars they’ve watched online. The easy access to and widespread consumption of pornography among tweens and teens reinforces warped attitudes of women as little more than sexual objects.

The country, however, has always been more riveted by high-profile cases of sexual abuse involving celebrities than by how to better educate young people about respecting other people’s bodies. The latest reports involve Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who has joined a growing list of powerful men facing accusations of sexual misconduct.

Multiple women allege Bill Cosby raped them. Rape allegations have also surfaced against Weinstein. Fox News employees say Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly abused their positions for years by sexually harassing women there. The highest officeholder in the land has also battled similar allegations. At least 15 women have publicly accused President Donald Trump, who was elected after being caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by their genitals, of sexual harassment and assault.

These men have all denied wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, 27 percent of middle school-aged girls and 25 percent of boys reported that they had experienced verbal or physical sexual harassment or violence, the most common being unwanted touching, according to the study. Middle school counselors talk about trying to deal with rampant sexting among students, and increasingly educate students about the risks of digital sexual experimentation. But rarely are sexual harassment and consent discussed in this context.

Here’s an easy test for parents: Ask your middle schooler if he or she knows the difference between sexual harassment and assault. Find out if it’s part of the health curriculum. If it isn’t, define it for them: Sexual harassment includes unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other conduct of a sexual nature that affects a person’s employment or education, interferes with work or educational performance, or creates an environment that a reasonable person would find intimidating, hostile or offensive. Let them know it’s unacceptable.

The way boys treat their classmates now lays the foundation for how they will treat their co-workers later. We’ve seen an avalanche of victims who have shared details of the abuse they’ve suffered. Too often, powerful people have been able to degrade and abuse others because wealth, status and societal attitudes insulate them. Young people take note when these serial offenders don’t appear to suffer real consequences. They hear those who defend sexual predators based on their personal interactions with an individual, rather than the merits of the allegations against them.

I saw this pattern of denial every time a popular coach or religious leader was implicated in a sexual crime. The default response of the community was to take the side of the accused. Many believed that if a predator was good to them or helped them, he was falsely accused.

While we may perceive a difference between a predator who accosts women in the street versus one who attacks them in a well-appointed office, there is no difference.

Different setting, same character.

The most basic lessons we teach toddlers are the same ones we to need to hold them accountable to as they grow up: Be respectful. Keep your hands to yourself. No matter how large or fragile your ego, you don’t have the right to grab anyone.

Not even if you are the smartest kid in the science class, a star athlete or the boy next door.

Not even if you are the most powerful producer in Hollywood or the president of the United States.

By now, the NRA is banking on us having moved on from the last massacre.

The images have started to fade from the latest grisly horror show in which innocent people -- just like you or me -- are mowed down in a public place by a madman with a gun raining bullets on a crowd. They are betting that the scene isn’t as shocking as it was 18 years ago at Columbine High School.

We’re so familiar with the subsequent “thoughts and prayers” stanza that it starts trending on Twitter before the body count is finalized. And the hubris of the National Rifle Association is so great that it is scheduled to begin running ads in Virginia’s gubernatorial race eight days after the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

Those of us still disgusted, heartbroken and angry about Las Vegas, Orlando, Charleston, San Bernardino, Newtown, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora -- and yes, Columbine -- can find hope in the NRA’s calculated disregard of the dead.

The powerful gun lobby, which opposes virtually every form of gun regulation, is drunk on its $36 million investment in a winning presidential candidate and a Republican-controlled Congress willing to kneel before its demands. And why not? While a horrified public has watched mass shootings increase, lawmakers at state and federal levels continue to make it easier to buy and carry guns. It’s easy to look at this trend and say that if Congress couldn’t pass universal background checks after the mass slaughter of first-graders in their classrooms, then nothing will ever move them to enact policies that will reduce gun-related deaths.

That’s a fundamental miscalculation of how this type of social change will happen. The NRA has unquestionable spending power, with an annual operating budget of about a quarter of a billion dollars and the ability to spend 15 times as much on campaign contributions as gun control advocates. Its greatest strength, however, is its energized and committed base willing to call and write legislators and vote on unfettered access to guns as a single issue.

But the NRA’s managed to galvanize more than just its base; it’s galvanized mothers.

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, Shannon Watts founded Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. They started with 4,500 active members and now have 60,000. There are active, committed volunteers in every state, including deep-red ones like Missouri. Congressional candidates are coming to these Moms meetings in St. Louis and organizing on the issue of gun safety laws. That has happened through the power of grassroots action, by an expanding platform on social media and by the growing disgust every time there’s another senseless attack.

Our society isn’t building up a tolerance to gun violence; it’s building up to a tipping point against it.

In our lifetimes, policies on all sorts of issues have moved in ways that people didn’t think were possible. Look at the change in public attitudes toward gay marriage, smoking and health care. Now, we’re seeing the beginnings of a similar shift on gun safety. Public attitudes are shaped by a growing number of voices saying “enough.”

Mainstream late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel nearly broke down during an emotional monologue the day after the attack in Las Vegas. He talked convincingly and from the heart about the need for basic, common-sense gun reform. That is not the sort of testimony America has seen from a comedian.

The same day, a country music guitarist -- who played at the outdoor concert where he saw a gunman kill 59 and injure more than 500 people -- publicly defected from the NRA crowd.

“I’ve been a proponent of the 2nd Amendment my whole life,” Caleb Keeter wrote on Twitter, “until the events of last night. I can’t express how wrong I was.”

The lead guitarist for the Texas-based Josh Abbott Band noted, “We actually have members of our crew with (concealed handgun licenses), and legal firearms on the bus. They were useless,” he wrote. “We couldn’t touch them for fear police might think we were part of the massacre and shoot us.”

He summed up what so many Americans have felt: ”Enough is enough.”

This is the NRA’s base slowly starting to turn away from propaganda. Multiple studies show a downward trend in gun ownership among American households over the past 20 years. About 90 percent of Americans support background checks for every gun sale. Nine states have universal background checks.

With each attack, it’s harder to convince the public that a person’s right to own a semiautomatic assault weapon outweighs a child’s right to not be killed at school. Each time there’s a gruesome attack and Congress takes no action, it moves the needle. Every election where the NRA flaunts its multimillion-dollar moneybags in the wake of a national tragedy, it motivates voters to push back against absolute power.

No political party stays in power forever.

An army of mothers, a late-night comedian and a country band guitarist will help bring about the change that so many believe is out of reach.

Stick around for the long game.