Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead. – Louisa May Alcott

In honor of International Women’s Day, this: a repurposing of an essay that I wrote for Canadian Family a couple of years ago, about my ambitions and frustrations in living up to my own self-assigned feminist mother bona fides. I still struggle with these questions, somewhat. Inasmuch as I don’t struggle anymore it’s because she’s defeated me. She’s my own wild horse (unstolen), and she throws me regularly. I’m mostly happy about that.

When I was 11 years old, I stole a horse. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that I borrowed the horse — I had every intention of returning it — but still: I took a horse that did not belong to me. There are laws against that. I stole the horse because I wanted to ride the horse. That I had no saddle or bridle or harness nor any real skill at riding was of as little concern to me as the fact that the horse was not mine to ride. I wanted to ride, and ride I did. I got on that horse and jabbed my heels into his flanks and we sped forward, through the paddock gate and out into the hayfield where we galloped for two or three breathtaking minutes until he bucked and tossed me to the ground. It was exhilarating. I had broken at least two laws — theft and trespassing — and had very nearly broken my neck, but all I could think was: when can I do this again?

I’ve never forgotten that feeling. I remember it every time that I do something exhilarating, something that makes me feel alive. I remember it every time I watch my daughter do pretty much anything.

My daughter, who is 6 going on 26, has a knack for turning every activity into a hair-raising, knuckle-whitening exercise in full-throttle adventure. Trees are for climbing, fences are for scaling and stair banisters are for sliding. Beds cannot be slept in until they have been bounced into submission, and kitchen stools are for facilitating raids on the cookie cupboard. I’m pretty certain – no, I’m entirely certain – that if there were horses anywhere near our home, she’d have already figured out how to steal one. She’d return it, I’m sure, but she’d ride the hell out of it before she did.

Her zeal for life is both awesome and terrifying to behold. It is awesome, because her confidence and her adventurousness hold every promise for a future of limitless possibility: my daughter, if she continues on this spirited path, will grow up expecting that she can and should pursue any ambition and that she will not and should not be held back by anything other than her own will and ability. But it is terrifying for exactly the same reasons: her confidence and her adventurousness may lead her to regard the world with all its fences, locked cupboards and laws of gravity as something to be conquered, and I’m not sure that “conquering” is the best pastime for a first grader.

So I’m torn. I’m torn between the impulse to rein her in, and the desire to let her run a little bit wild. I want her to understand and appreciate rules and boundaries, but I also want her to be the sort of girl who will not hesitate to push them. Which is the source of the problem, really: I want her to push boundaries, but I don’t want her to push all boundaries. I want my daughter to be rebellious, but within reasonable and socially sanctioned limits. I want her to grow up understanding that it is good and sometimes even necessary to challenge rules, but as a mother trying to manage a busy household, I often wish that she would just step in line and do as I say, no questions asked. And so I worry about the contradictions here. I want her to be her own girl. I want her to be a dream-chaser and a mountain-scaler and a rule-breaker and, yes, a horse-borrower. I don’t want to get in her way, except when I do.

I want, of course, for my children to be rebellious only in positive ways, in ways that respect the integrity of such larger-order social principles as co-operation and consideration for others and mindfulness of social norms and mores and, you know, laws. But for some reason I worry more about my daughter’s ability to do this on those terms than I do my three year old son. I simply don’t have anxieties about my boy growing into the sort of high-speed, rule-breaking adventurer that his sister is, to the extent that I’ve actually not given it much thought at all. I’ve assumed, I suppose, as he demonstrates the same levels of spiritedness as his sister, that that’s just what boys are often like. Aren’t boys supposed to steal horses? Doesn’t society, for better or for worse, expect that? Who cares if he grows up to be a rule-breaker, a maverick? That’s good, right? For boys?

Herein resides the problem: my anxieties about Emilia’s high-spiritedness are really kind of sexist. But they’re also rooted in very real concerns, I think. As a girl, my daughter faces more entrenched expectations of good behavior. She just does. I want the world and the culture to change in this regard, I really do – and I do everything that I can to contribute to that change. But those gendered expectations are still there, for now. I worry that if she can’t find the balance between being the good girl who understands that it is sometimes safest and smartest to follow the rules and expectations of social life, and the bad girl who grabs social expectations by the mane and kicks her heels in hard, she might find herself getting thrown and hurt. Again, it’s sexist of me to worry about this more for her than I do for my son, but I do. And I hate that it’s sexist of me.

But this is my battle, not hers.

Which is why I make, and make again, and again, and again, every day, this commitment to her: that I will respect her spirit, always, even when it causes me to worry. I will remember to simply be proud and encouraging of my bright, independent girl, to cheer her as she seeks out her horses and rides them until she’s thrown. And I will, in those moments, just help her pick herself up, brush herself off and whisper, go on, go ahead — do it again.

And then maybe hand her a saddle.

TEDWomen was an idea-hurricane, an inspiration-avalanche, a brainwave tsunami, a tornado of provocation and stimulation, a force of nature – if nature wore high heels – a force to be reckoned with, a thing to make your heart pound and thrum and swell and your head throb from the magnificent pressure of all those ideas, all those amazing, inspiring ideas.

It was impossible to be there and be unmoved, unchanged. I took notes.

It will take me days to process it all, to distill even a fraction of it into coherent thoughts and workable ideas. But I will. If only to ease the pressure on my brain, and slow the pounding of my heart, I will.

After I sleep for forty hours, that is.

“Every girl in the world deserves the chance to pursue her hopes and dreams.” – Hilary Clinton, TEDWomen, Washington D.C., December 8, 2010

Every girl does deserve that chance. My girl deserves that chance. This girl deserves that chance. All of these girls – and these boys; yes, boys too (our liberation requires their liberation, and ours, theirs, as a wise man said yesterday, and so we must care about them, too, even as we extend our hands to our girls, to all girls) – deserve that chance.

It is our job, our work, our responsibility to do whatever we can to help them get it.

(“all which isn’t singing is mere talking” – e.e. cummings) (we really must do so much more than talk. we really, really must sing.)

My mother always told me that I was beautiful. “You are a beautiful, beautiful girl, sweetie,” she would say, and I would reply – with much eye-rolling and heavy sighing – “you’re my mother. You have to say that.”

I knew that I wasn’t beautiful, not in the way that princesses in fairy tales or fashion models or the older, made-up girls who worked the cosmetic counter at Eatons were beautiful. I was tall and awkward and gangly, which, yes, I know, is exactly the way that girls who go on to become fashion models and perfume-spritzers describe themselves, but I really was tall and awkward and gangly and also frizzy of hair – hair that I insisted, after seeing the movie Pretty In Pink, upon dyeing red, which did not help its texture – and prominent of nose and so I am not being coyly self-deprecating when I say that I believed, that I knew, that I was not beautiful. My mother wasn’t lying to me, but she was, I knew, viewing me through mother-colored glasses, which as we all know are constructed with tempered and tinted glass and glazed with sparkles and stardust. Of course she couldn’t see what I saw when I looked in the mirror. I was looking at myself with clear and critical eyes. She was looking at me with love.

I spent years struggling to come to terms with my looks. I wanted to be beautiful, but I didn’t see beauty when I looked in the mirror, and so I costumed and primped and transformed myself relentlessly, one day playing the part of the poetry-scribbling goth (dark hair, Fleuvog boots, lots of eyeliner, dog-eared copy of l’Etranger), the other playing the part of the quirky outcast who really might be pretty behind her vintage rhinestone-encrusted frames (red hair, Goodwill sweater, antique brooches), yet another pretending to be an avant-garde performance artist who might or might not be rehearsing her one-woman dramatic reading of  Gender Trouble (white blond hair, catsuit, cowboy boots.) (Oh, dear lord. The catsuits. Can we all just pretend that 1990 never happened?) My mother would ask me why I kept hiding. “I’m not hiding,” I would say. “I’m expressing myself.” And I was. I was expressing myself in a thousand different ways that I hoped would draw attention to the parts of me that were interesting, and away from those parts that I thought were, if not ugly, then, at least, unbeautiful. If I was interesting enough, nobody would notice that I wasn’t pretty. I couldn’t make the world look at me through mother-colored glasses, but I could surround myself with mirrored glass and dry-ice fog and disco lights and it would, I figured, amount to more or less the same thing.

It never felt like the same thing.

***

When I was in twelfth grade, I experimented briefly with not costuming myself. I kept the red hair but grew out the asymmetrical cut and trimmed my bangs and pulled my hair back and wore preppy sweaters and jeans and not much make-up. I acquired a pair of penny loafers, and I wore them unironically. My dad, at the time, was having what used to be called a nervous breakdown, and my parents’ marriage was in crisis, and although they both assured me and my sister that we would be fine, that they loved each other very much and that they loved us very much and that we would be, really, fine, I worried. I worried constantly, and it seemed very, very important that whenever I walked out our front door I looked exactly as they saw me, through their mother- and father-colored glasses; that I looked like me, just me, unadorned. Why that translated, in my seventeen-year old mind, to Upper Canada Preppy – which is, of course, just another costume – I don’t really know, but it seemed to me that this was the look that concealed me least, the one that involved the fewest distracting elements, the one that left me little or nothing to hide behind. It seemed important that I do that, that I not hide. It seemed, somehow, to be key to our family remaining intact, that I comport myself as though I were as beautiful as my parents thought I was, that I actively reinforce their view of me, their view of us, that I assert their rightness about how much beauty lived in our home, about how much beauty lived in us and surrounded us, always.

For some reason, penny loafers and blunt-cut bangs seemed a reasonable way to accomplish that.

This is me, then:

I look at this now and I see what my parents saw and I think, of course I was beautiful. I don’t know that I was any more or less beautiful in the penny loafers and Aran sweaters than I was in the goth eyeliner or the Goodwill costumes – I have almost no photographs from my costume periods – but it doesn’t really matter: here, I felt exposed. I look at this picture and I think: the girl in that picture is beautiful. But I also think: the girl in that picture is terrified. Sure, it’s the picture of a girl whose family is crumbling, but it’s also the picture of a girl who’s trying to disappear into her sweater, the better to hide her face. And I just want to hug her, and tell her that she’s beautiful, no matter what she’s wearing. I want to tell her that she has nothing to hide. I want to tell her that it is going to be okay – no matter how difficult things get – and that she will carry herself beautifully through whatever life throws at her, and that, yes, sometimes a chunky sweater will make it all a little bit easier to bear, and so will high heels and lipstick, sometimes, but that no matter what happens, and no matter what she wears to get through it, she will be beautiful. She is beautiful.

I want to race back in time to say that to her, and I want to leap into the future to say it to Emilia, whenever she hits that moment of self-doubt, if she ever does. But I know that I would be, that I will be – were I to, when I do, say such things – accused of wearing mother-colored glasses, of not seeing things clearly. And to that I would say, I want to say, I will say: yes, yes, I am wearing glasses. Mother-colored, maybe. Love-colored, certainly. And I want them for you, too; I want you to look at yourself, to look at everything, always, as through a love-colored glass, brightly.

And then I’ll tell her that when the time comes, she really, really mustn’t wear that catsuit.

What would you tell your teenaged self about beauty, given the chance? Would you tell her – him? – to stop worrying and love that nose? That someday, she’ll be thankful for that thick hair? That it wasn’t just you, that acid-wash jeans made everyone look like a dork? What will you tell your daughter, or, for that matter, your son? What do you look like when you look at yourself through love-colored glasses – or, what would you look like, if you dared put them on? Leave a comment and I’ll select one of you, randomly, (yes, Canadians too) to receive The Beauty Of Different, which is an amazing, gorgeous, soul-lifting book by my friend Karen, who lives the art of looking at the world, and at people, through love-colored glasses better than almost anyone I know.

****

Thanks so much, you guys, for the lovely, soul-lifting comments. The winner of Karen’s book is Johanna; the rest of you, I highly recommend that you put it on your holiday wish list.

Dear Emilia,

Today, you are five.

This is both totally extraordinary, and utterly ordinary. Which of these it is varies from minute to minute: in one moment, I look at you and think, when did you become such a big girl? Where did that little baby go? Where has the time gone? HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT YOU ARE FIVE? In another, I look at you and I think, wasn’t it ever thus? Have you not always been this little girl, this little big girl, this here-and-now person who is so completely and utterly you that any other yous, all the previous yous, are almost unimaginable?

That you are five and that you are you and that you become ever more you – ever more consistently you and ever more differently you – with every passing day is, for me, a joy for which I have no words. But it is also a sadness, an ongoing grief – a quiet grief, the kind that just hums, quietly, in the darker corners of my soul – and for it, too, I have no words. How do I describe the feeling of celebrating you and mourning you, all at once? Of the joy that I feel in your presence that thrums with a nagging sensation of loss? The complicated happiness that is loving the incomparable you that you are now and aching to discover the incomparable you that you will be tomorrow and missing the incomparable you that you were yesterday, last month, last year? The sweet sadness that comes with yearning to find out who you will become while clinging to the you that you were?

You are, of course, always you. There is an ineffable you, an unchanging Emilia who is the anchor of the baby, the toddler, the kindergartener, the girl, who is the Emilia that sings her Emilianess, always, who I know is constant, or as constant as anything mortal can be. But there is also the mercurial you, the Emilia who is always changing and growing, the Emilia who, a few weeks ago, would only eat sandwiches with butter and jam, but who now will only eat them with cheese, and then only if ‘the bread is warm but the cheese isn’t melted and MOMMY I SAID NO CRUSTS.” The Emilia who, last year, was going to be a drummer and a race car driver when she got bigger - “next year I think, Mommy, after I learn to tie my shoelaces” – but who now is going to be a snowboarder and rock star (“here is my secret, Mommy: when I hear a song that I like, I copy it in my head so that when I am rock star and have my electric guitar I can remember them and play them properly”) (on that playlist: Lady Gaga, Leonard Cohen, Journey and Hannah Montana) and who knows how to tie her shoelaces but does not yet know how to drive. The Emilia who will someday know how to drive. The Emilia who will someday, who must, someday, drive away from me.

Or walk, or bicycle, or pilot a helicopter, who knows. The point is that I do not yet know anything about that Emilia, except that she will leave. That you will leave. Ah, my heart.

This is the cliche of mothers, of course: that they clutch and cling and try to keep their babies babies. I don’t want to keep you as a baby. You will always be my baby, but that will be true whether you are four or five or fourteen or fifteen or fifty. And I’m dying to know what you will be like, who you will be, at fourteen and fifteen and fifty, to say nothing of tomorrow and the next day and the next. I adore who you are now, and it seems impossible that I could love you any more than I do at right this very moment, but I also know from experience that my love for you becomes, with every passing moment, ever more full, more complex, more replete with color and texture and depth and movement, as you become every more fully you, ever more complexly you, ever more replete with your you-ness. The cliche, then, is limited, misleading. I do not want to freeze you in time, lock you in the tower, keep you bound to my side.

But then again, there is still a tiny part of me – maybe a not so tiny part of me – that does want to keep you with me, that does want to hold onto the you that you are in any and every given moment, that does mourn the ongoing loss of these yous, that does struggle, in some moments, with the urge to pray to every god in the heavens to freeze time here, right here, and keep us here for eternity.

And then off you run, clutching your cheese sandwich and your guitar and your backpack full of dreams and schemes and bubblegum, and I think, go, go YOU. Walk the clouds, ride the wind, baby, fly on.

Fly on.

Happy birthday, little girl.

Love,

Mommy

If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop? — Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication On The Rights Of Women (Chapter 3)

(Photographosophy, Pissy Feminist Edition.)

A few weeks after I gave birth to Jasper, I wrote this:

I do it every night now. When it’s dark, when the rest of the house is asleep, or almost, I untangle my tiny newborn bundle from my arms and lay him down in his nest and ease my birth-battered body from our bed. I make my way – gingerly, gingerly – around the bed, supporting myself on furniture, against the walls, down the hallway, to her door.

I open it slowly, holding my breath against the creaks, and slip inside. There, in the dark, is she, my first baby. Rumpled and tangled in her blankets, her breathing slow and deep, strands of fluffy blonde hair stuck to her damp, pink cheeks, she is every inch the baby. A big baby, but still. A baby, my baby. In the quiet, in repose, she is no longer toddler, no longer little girl, no longer big sister – she is just she, my first born, my first baby, always a baby, always soft and vulnerable and in need of me, always in need of me.

I bend over the rail of her bed, and kiss her cheek, and stroke her hair and whisper nothing, everything, about how I love her so, how I adore her, how I miss her. How every nuzzle of her brother’s cheek brings a memory of her; how every clutch and suck and moment of skin pressed against newborn skin makes my heart burst for him and yearn for her; how my love for him has made my love for her grow and stretch and strain and ache.

How I love her, how I love her.

In the morning she will wake, and run past me, blowing a kiss as she clambers into Daddy’s arms, waving gaily as she embarks upon the great adventure of a new day, while I sit, constrained, restrained, by the injuries of childbirth and new motherhood (shredded nethers, ravaged nips), my new love in my arms, my new love demanding everything of me and yielding himself to me, pressing himself to me, in return. I will drink up his love, bathe in his love, as she speeds away, leaving me in her wake, grasping at droplets, holding back tears.

But it doesn’t matter, because, always, she will stop again, however briefly, and rest, and she will allow me to bend over her bed, in the dark, and stroke her cheek and tell her how I love her, my first, my girl.

How I love her.

In those early days of my son’s life – those days that were so like the early days of my daughter’s life,  the days that were so often defined by exhaustion and anxiety and discomfort – my physical attachment to my daughter was a lifeline. The same, of course, could be said of my physical attachment to my son – his constant physical presence, his rootedness at my breast, night and day and day and night, around the clock, always – but this attachment carried certain anxieties: was my attachment to this baby drawing me away from my other baby? Were my demonstrations of love and devotion uneven? Would my daughter resent me for this, for my divided attention, for my allowing this other baby to usurp her place? How could my heart be in two places at once?

It was, of course, in two places, and it lived – it lives, now – in those places comfortably, expansively, but I could only recognize that and believe that, at the time, when I clung to my daughter and inhaled her and allowed myself to remember, to know, that my connection to her is always.

Jasper just turned two. Two years old. Two years have passed since he came into our lives, since we went from three to four, since Emilia went from being our one and only to being one of two. And he is such a big presence, this little man, with his stampeding feet and his grabbing hands and his dimpled grin, and his sister loves him so, but still, there are moments when she grabs my hand and she whispers I want a hug from just you, Mommy and my heart seizes a little and I hug her and I whisper, back, you’re my very favorite girl, did you know that? and I inhale the fragrance of her hair and feel the flutter of her heart and even though I know that I don’t need to keep her hand in mine or clutch her to my chest or curl up against her sleeping form to reassure myself that she is, always, my girl, I want to, I want to, and I tell myself, tonight I will sneak into her room and I will wrap my arms around her and sing, in a whisper, songs of love and candy and I will think – for the hundred-trillionth time – how I love her.

And I will wish that I could do it every night; I will wish that I could hold her and tell her that I love her constantly; I will wish that it were possible to live my love for her, my unique love for her, in every single moment and in such a way that she never, ever, had to tug on my hand and ask for a hug. But there is only so much time for so many hugs and so many kisses and there are only so many nights during which one can sneak into a child’s room and snuggle and sing and there are two of them, now, and I want both of them to have all of my love and then some and even though I know that my love for them is infinite, that is has no bounds, I sometimes feel the weight of those limitations – not enough time, not enough energy, not enough arms – like a mantle of chains.

We know that we have more than enough love to give. Whether we have one or two or six children, we know that we have more than enough love to give. So why do we sometimes worry that we’re not giving enough?