On the third day of school, Cecily King decided she needed to upgrade her middle-schooler's bulletproof backpack liner with one that could shield her from the rapid-fire rounds of an assault rifle.

This is what back-to-school shopping in America looks like.

The $300 insert is advertised as providing "military-trusted" protection for the "vital torso area" of a young child in the line of fire in a classroom. The upgrade was prompted by the events of Aug. 23, when King, a St. Louis-area dance instructor and mother of four, received emails and texts from her daughter's middle school about a "yellow-level threat." The threat led to a two-hour lockdown.

"It was a very long two hours," King said.

For many in the area, the memories are still vivid from a shooting last year at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School (CVPA) and Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience, with which CVPA shares a building. On Oct. 24, 2022, a 19-year-old armed with a Palmetto State Armory PA-15 rifle killed a teacher and a student there.

Five of King's dance students attended CVPA.

"They were jumping over bullets on the floor, running past a body," she said.

That's when she and her husband decided to purchase the initial bulletproof backpack protection for their daughter, along with a cellphone with a GPS tracking app. After the Aug. 23 threat at the school, King's mother offered to split the cost of a new backpack liner that can protect against automatic rifle bullets.

"It's maddening. It's sickening. It makes my stomach turn that in order to keep my kid safe in school, this is what we have to do," King said.

Shooters have used AR-15s or similar semi-automatic rifles to massacre people in a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado; a nightclub in Orlando, Florida; a high school in Parkland, Florida; a music festival in Las Vegas; a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado; an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut; a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee; an office party in San Bernardino, California; on the streets of Midland and Odessa, Texas; in synagogues near San Diego and in Pittsburgh; a church service in Sutherland Springs, Texas; an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas; and a dollar store in Jacksonville, Florida. There were more school shootings in 2022 -- 46 -- than in any year since at least 1999, according to a tracker maintained by the Washington Post. The paper has counted 386 school shootings since Columbine.

No other country in the world comes close to murdering its schoolchildren the way America does.

Sales for bulletproof backpacks soared last year after a gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. He killed 19 children and two teachers.

The gear doesn't stop with bulletproof backpacks: In December, a New Jersey school district equipped its schools with armored shields: Ostensibly, teachers are supposed to hide students behind the shields while herding them to a safe corner of a classroom or ushering them outdoors. The shields were mounted next to fire extinguishers.

In the wake of the horror in Uvalde, Republicans pivoted to talking about ways to "harden" or fortify schools. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz talked about changing schools' doors. Anything to avoid mentioning the elephant in the room: the hundreds of millions of guns flooding America.

When St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones talked recently about her efforts to rein in the AR-15s on the city's streets, gun lovers had the usual meltdowns about their "rights" -- to conceal carry; to open carry; to buy, on a whim, whenever and however they want, the very weapons used to terrorize and massacre our children.

Any nation that makes guns more precious than its own children has lost its way.

A recent post in a moms' Facebook group asked about the best ways to track the location of elementary school-aged children. Moms swapped tips about the best surveillance and tracking devices. A few mothers said they attach Apple AirTags to their kids' shoes and backpacks.

Our Republican lawmakers would rather see a kindergartner covered in body armor, lugging a bulletproof backpack with GPS trackers planted in their sneakers, than pass gun safety laws.

The GOP wants to harden schools.

They've already hardened their hearts.

Last week, I felt stoic and enlightened about our youngest child leaving for college.

Seven days later, I feel like a liar.

I still stand by what I wrote earlier: I am excited for our children to experience everything the college years have to offer. I know we will still be involved and needed in their semi-independent lives. But I mistakenly thought I could intellectualize myself out of the emotional turbulence that accompanies this transition.

The morning before our flights to the kids' new horizons, I woke up feeling unsettled. They had to finish packing. The boy's friends were coming over for dinner and to hang out -- their last hurrah until Thanksgiving break.

Before I got out of bed, I texted a handful of close friends and my siblings.

"We're leaving tomorrow to drop both kids off at college, and I feel terrible," I wrote. I got empathetic responses from the moms who had recently experienced the same milestone, or were approaching it.

I curled up next to my husband and said, "I don't feel so great about this."

He made a sympathetic grunt and started snoring.

That's not to say that dads aren't emotionally affected by this process of letting go. My husband cried more than once after we dropped off our daughter two years ago, and he has warned me to expect similar tears when we leave our son in his dorm. He is not a crier, by the way.

After last week's column, I received several well-intentioned responses from fathers who could relate to my emotions. My colleague and friend Bill McClellan sent this note:

"The one thing I did miss when our youngest, Jack, went to college -- and I noticed it right away -- were the other parents. They were all casual friends, and they were all suddenly gone. Vanished. These were people, mostly dads, that I had stood on the sidelines with at soccer and tennis matches for years. I saw them every week, sometimes a couple of times a week. The kids kept up with each other on Facebook or whatever, but the parents did not. An entire part of my life that I had enjoyed but gave little thought to.

"Gone."

I hadn't even thought about the loss of friends we had made over the years of extracurricular activities. The message was a little bleak, Bill.

Another father wrote to share a similar experience: "After the fourth went away to college, I continued to attend the high school football games, etc. as I had done for a decade, thinking it would be the same. It wasn't. My youngest also happened to coincide with the youngest of all our friends. I sat alone, yet I persisted for the entire season."

This poignant scene -- a dedicated father sitting all alone game after game -- twisted a knife in my heart.

The dads were not helping.

That same morning, one of my friends shared a recent New York Times article saying we should lean into our negative emotions. It's healthier to acknowledge our feelings and let them pass, the research says. Feeling bad about feeling bad only makes you feel worse. That article gave me permission to feel a little off-kilter and sad.

I decided to make blueberry muffins and go to a yoga class. Maybe baking and moving would cheer me up. As I walked into the class, I told the instructor that I was leaving the next day to drop both our children at college for the first time.

The teacher teared up!

"I can't imagine," she said. "It must be so hard." This young yoga instructor seemed years away from college drop-offs. She asked if I was OK.

I guess, I said. Truthfully, I had been questioning my parenting choices on the way over. My parents had given me the option of applying to any college within the radius of a four-hour drive. Why had I expanded those boundaries for my own kids?

During the class, I focused on breathing and stretching.

Afterwards, the teacher hugged me. She said she would be sending positive vibes to me. I don't know if it was all the breathing or the hug, but I did feel considerably better.

The wisdom of the dads, younger parents, childless friends, the experts quoted in the Times -- it had all helped.

It's normal to feel nervous about big changes.

It's OK to let my heart break a little when I leave pieces of it behind.

When your youngest or only child is heading off to college, one question keeps cropping up: Are you ready for an empty nest?

I've heard this query in all its variations dozens of times over the past several months. We will be moving both our children into their dorms in a state hundreds of miles away on the same weekend later this month.

Friends with younger children look at me with a mix of concern and pity when they ask how I feel about my impending empty nest. I've taken to assuring those who ask that I'm fine. Everything's fine. We're all fine. I'm totally fine.

Maybe it doesn't sound so reassuring when I say it like that.

But part of me also wants to push back on the assumption built into the question. We've already had two years of being parents to our older college-aged child. While it isn't on a daily basis, this young adult still needs our guidance, support and financial backing. It doesn't feel like the child-rearing work is complete once tuition bills start arriving. In fact, it seems to usher in a time of greater parental anxiety and far less control.

I would never say this to a sleep-deprived, exhausted parent of toddlers, but it's more mentally taxing to be raising adolescents and college students than young kids. They are in a liminal space -- no longer under your direct supervision but not quite ready to fend for themselves. Their brains aren't fully developed yet, but they fully believe they are.

It's also around this time that you can appreciate things your children are able to do that you cannot. Our daughter can write college papers in French, a level of foreign language mastery I never achieved. Our son can play the trumpet, whereas I have no musical ability or talent. They both learned calculus in high school, which was beyond my comprehension even in college. Their interests, abilities and talents have diverged from our own, and that's pretty amazing to witness.

As they move closer to independence and adulthood, we're going to miss the events that filled our schedules for the past several years -- tennis matches, school plays, debate tournaments, band performances and all the practices, rehearsals, celebrations and get-togethers that came along with their activities.

But it's also interesting to discover how we will fill that newly found time.

We will miss the two extra places at the table at dinner and having someone around who was always willing to run to the grocery store or fix my computer issues. But I'm more excited to see how they are going to grow and the great adventures ahead in their lives.

An empty nest conjures images of a discarded, abandoned haunt, a former refuge that has been deserted. That's not the scene I'm preparing for around here. Their stuff is still all over our home. They parachute in as needed and have a soft place to land.

These are more like the Airbnb Years. Young people show up for holidays and respite and summer vacations. They bring youthful energy and dirty laundry and bigger grocery bills.

A wise mom whose children were all fully launched told me that the empty nest era doesn't begin until your children are financially independent and living on their own. A fair amount of therapy has taught me that you can change the way you feel about something if you can change the way you think about it.

So, that's the approach I'm taking to this so-called empty nest.

Feel free to check in with me next month after the big drop-off. I'm pretty sure I'll be fine.