I was 20 weeks pregnant the second time around when we got the official word that this time we were having a girl. I wept. I had been 100% sure she was a boy (thanks for nothing, online sex-predictor quizzes), and I was already firmly in love with the image I had painted in my head of this new little brother. Also, all of our crib bedding was blue.

But more important than all that was my fear–sexist, narcissistic, and huge–that having a girl meant having a smaller version of myself. And I would have wished being any version of me on no one, especially a little teeny thing I had a sworn duty to protect.

And then she was born, and of course I forgot all that instantly, thrown head over heels with that (little, skinny, wrinkled-up, and totally bald) baby girl. She was nothing like her brother either in temperament or in appearance, but I also couldn’t see very much of myself in her, even though I tried, or her father even. At first she mostly resembled an alien, and I would hold her protectively to my chest and say things like, “It’s fine. Looks are not what matters. We will teach her to be kind.”

But slowly, without us even realizing, she grew into the kind of baby that people would stop us on the streets just to gaze upon–gasping when they saw her porcelain skin and rosy cheeks and the translucent glow of her bright blue eyes. And I worried if maybe that was worse, this beauty, because I still believed kindness was more important and yet I knew we were going to someday send her out into a world that hadn’t yet come to that communal understanding, and beauty is a fickle stroke of luck that people can often (and usually to their own detriment) confuse with a skill.

Every morning when I would get up with her and get her dressed, I would pull out the pink dresses and rompers and pretty shoes and headbands, trying to decide which outfit would be the most perfect. And then inevitably I would look down at myself, standing there in my bleach stained yoga pants and my tee shirt I had borrowed from my husband because it would have been cruel to stuff my newly nursing boobs and my deflated inner tube of a pregnant belly remnant into a normal sized shirt. Logic would win, and I would put her fancy clothes back into her drawer with a sigh and dig out a stained comfy sleeper that had already been thoroughly loved through her brother’s babyhood before her. It just didn’t seem fair to sass her all up in scratchy tulle when our only plans for the day involved eating, pooping, and hopefully napping.

Most of those frilly things ended up sitting untouched in her drawers until I donated them to braver babies than my own, and today, a decade later anyway, she still pulls her clothes from her brother’s drawer just as often as she pulls them from her own. I’m biased, I know, but she’s also still the kind of pretty that makes people stare, including me, and I do – stealing glances at her while she sits next to me recently in the car.

I have been doing this with her for years, stealing glances, because she is also the kind of quiet-shy that makes it painful for her sometimes to make direct eye contact. So it surprised me there in the car to find her watching me back. After some serious thought–and checking a few times to make sure I didn’t have anything gross stuck in my teeth– I realized why she was watching me.

I think she’s trying to figure out how to do this. How to grow up. How to survive. How to become a woman.

Because I am a mature role model for young ladies everywhere, my immediate reaction to this was to hyperventilate. I mean, talk about pressure! See also: insecurity, terror, and deep-seeded Mom issues of my own. There in the car, hurtling down the Mass Pike (“Mommy, why do they call it a Pike?”), I had myself a little panic attack. Who am I to teach anyone about womanhood? I’m not even sure what that means. I don’t own a single frilly thing, I’ve only had one (relatively) successful romantic relationship, and I think underwire is the devil incarnate. When my own body started to change towards womanhood eons ago, I responded by starving it back into pre-pubescence. Clearly, I am no one’s role model.

Then I forced myself to breathe. Let’s be logical here, I thought. Remember the tulle? Women don’t need frilly things (although they might WANT them, and that’s okay too). One successful romantic relationship has proven itself to really be all that I ever needed, and if her body is anything like mine she won’t even need the underwire.

And I remembered how there is this parenthood realization that comes a few years into the mess when you have learned enough about what you are doing to swim up to the surface and look around at how gorgeous the water is. It happens like this, in this order:

“Oh my God, I made that,” and then quickly, on the heels of that, “and it’s going to leave me someday.” It’s the two sides of the coin of motherhood, and maybe of life itself, the drawing in and holding close and the pushing forth and letting go. Both sides can be beautiful or brutal both in the same moment, and the only way to survive when one feels like it is going to crush you is to remember the other.