My daughter’s school uniform smells like the place where I was bullied

Dear Delyara, My daughter started at the secondary school I attended. The uniform has barely changed. Same navy blazer, same striped tie, same smell of damp wool after rain. When she comes home and throws it over a chair, I am thirteen again, hiding in a toilet while girls outside discuss my body loudly enough for me to hear. My daughter loves the school. She has friends, plays netball, and complains only about chemistry. I should be relieved. Instead, I interrogate every small change in her mood. If she says someone laughed in class, I ask who, why, whether it was directed at her. Last night she snapped, “Mum, school isn’t happening to me the way it happened to you.” She is right. I am turning her ordinary adolescence into surveillance because I am still trying to protect the girl I was. I cannot walk into the building for parents’ evening without feeling sick. My daughter deserves a school that belongs to her memories. My body keeps insisting it belongs to mine.