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(Originally published by the Orange County Register on Aug. 28, 2012. Reposted by permission.)

This year, we made back-to-school shopping a family affair. Which meant while my husband crammed four kids in a red Target cart and launched them down various aisles in an attempt to make and break new speed records, I spent two hours checking off lists over in school supply.

Four Fiskar scissors, 30 glue sticks and 96 Ticonderoga pencils later, I thought I'd finally covered it all. But then I realized I'd forgotten someone: me.

Because this year, I'm going back to school.

When I tell people this, I find that most adults and all kids look at me with a flabbergasted cringe that begs, "Why?"

So maybe I'm not the breadwinner around here. And I'll concede that a Master's degree in Professional Writing from USC may sound less lucrative than an MBA or Juris Doctorate. But I've been waiting for this day for 12 years.

I white-knuckled my way through the GRE, spent two months triple guessing my application essay, and begged, bribed and pleaded four professional relationships to write a few nice words about me. So I deserve to buy something with three rings and a pocket for myself.

As I survey the bins of wide-ruled and college-ruled, I wonder what else does a student of writing need? They didn't give me a list. I reach for a blue spiral notebook and as I hold it, it fades into another blue notebook from my past, one labeled as belonging to Jacob G.

Jacob G. was one of my seventh grade students when I taught English the year after I finished college. He was placed in my ESL/Special Education class, because with a transient past, no one had records determining where he actually belonged. I quickly realized he was bright and cheerful and wise beyond his years. But true to his track record, he vanished from my class a month into the school year, leaving his spiral blue journal behind, with only one clever passage written on the first page.

I kept that notebook well past Jacob's disappearance, and well past my tenure at that school when I left to stay home with my firstborn. In subsequent years, I'd occasionally find it and scribble within a grocery list or insurance quote. But like the notebook, I kept Jacob in my life - my mind - reminding myself that someday I'd be ready to return to kids like him and help them fill up their pages.

Over the years, blank pages have carried me through four pregnancies, two post-partums and volumes of otherwise amusing, humiliating and heartbreaking chapters. Blank pages have become me-what I enfold on the magical days and what I fear on the blocked ones.

At this moment on aisle 34, it's the fear that grips me: the surface fears that the laundry will never get done again, that the dog might literally eat my homework, or that the kids might forget we even have a dog while I'm away at class.

And then there are the real ones: that the kids might occasionally come home to an empty house, that my husband may question his place in my new world, that my superiors may deem me too inferior for theirs.

I reach out and take a shiny new blue notebook and throw it on top of my heaping cart. I'm not quite sure what words will fill it over the next two years, but I guess I'm ready to find out.

- Autumn McAlpin

Autumn McAlpin is a freelance writer and mother of four whose column, Cracking Up, runs weekly in the Orange County Register's parenting section. She also writes regularly about family entertainment, and is the author of the book Real World 101: A Survival Guide to Life After High School.