This is the season when mothers mourn. Little ones start nursery school and bigger ones enter high school. The biggest of them take the exit ramp from as it was to as it will be. College.

Starting this week, mom bloggers will write about these rites of passage. Facebook posts will leak emotion.  The rawest and sweetest words will come from the mothers whose college-bound children will be sleeping in their beds one night and gone from them the next.

It's a song sung in the round with variations on a theme. “It seems like only yesterday I was...