If my life were a movie, I would fast-forward through junior high.Like every junior high kid, I was struggling with who I was and how I would make my mark in life.But I was sure I was alone with these strange feelings. I was trying and failing in a number of things.I wanted to do well in athletics but had not yet figured out that would never happen.I wasn't academic enough to spell academic.I was trying to gain a spot as a new kid in school.All the while, I remember suffering the rejection of most of my peer, being cut from the basketball team, failing to play football that I so wanted to play.To be loved and accepted seemed to me at the time something I could never, in all my life, achieve. During that time I would go through the cafeteria line and eat alone, feeling unloved and unnoticed.As spring came, one day I was starting out the door and complaining that I had no one to eat with.Mom said to me, "If you want, you can come home for lunch." That day, when lunch came, it was a beautiful spring day in the hills of central Ohio.The bell rang at noon and I  _ from the school and ran across the little village home to eat. That was in about 1972.thirty years ago.My mom sat across the table for about 15 minutes and looked at me and listened to me and three decades later I still remember those times with fondness.She just paid attention to me.It's a powerful thing to pay attention to people. I now know that I didn't need my stomach filled as much as I needed my emotional fuel tank refilled.I just needed a friendly place of warm acceptance for a few minutes a day.And refueling an emotional fuel tank is a good mother's specialty. Now you know a little more about how I see home.Home is a place where you don't have to sit alone and eat.Home is a place where people don't ignore you and avoid you.Moms are people who listen to you when no one else is interested.And moms don't ever think the small unexciting things you do don't matter.Moms don't laugh at your dreams.Good moms pay attention.Great moms fix you something warm to eat and pay attention. Which word best describes the author's school life in junior high?
Painful. Precious. Unique. Clumsy.