I’m reading Deborah Spar’s new book Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection and, to be honest, I haven’t gotten that far. Between work, Griffin, and catching up on The Mindy Project, the book has been languishing on my bedside table. When I do pick it up, I find that I can only read two or three pages before getting lost in my own thoughts about what it means to be a woman today. If D. Spar, as my former Barnard girl self is want to call her, wrote it with the goal of sparking internal conflict and conversation she’s definitely succeeded.

Immediately upon receiving Wonder Women from my father I felt at a disadvantage. I am not married, don’t have kids, and have never felt oppressed or, ironically, disadvantaged as a woman. I grew up in a house not just full of, but dominated by, girls. I attended a top all-girls boarding school that, since it’s founding in 1843, has be telling women that they can be anything that they want, I was supported by my family and my community in taking a year off of school, going to college across the country, leaving that college for one closer to home (but visiting just as infrequently), and then leaving college all together to build a business. When my mom was a child any stop along that path would have been frowned upon if not shut down entirely by a stern look and withdrawal of the emotional, and the all important financial, support we sometimes forget is necessary to go big or go home.

As I reflect more deeply on my childhood which, according to some, I am still in. I have come to realize that the reasons for my atypical decisions and pursuit of a different path are rooted firmly in my early years. When D. Spar writes about the emergence of gender-blind child rearing techniques and Free to Be…You and Me I feel nostalgic. Yes, I had dolls. Yes, I even had a nightgown that matched the one that my American Girl Doll Samantha wore on cold winter nights. However, Sam shared space in the toy box with trains sets, building blocks, and colorful scarfs we were encouraged to transform into fanciful outfits, forts, and the occasional flag, signifying a truce was in order, during particularly feisty saturday afternoons. Meaningful in this, is the fact that these aren’t toys originally purchased for a brother that I snuck into my room or that were passed down to me. As the oldest of three girls, my parents, without telling us, were giving us the choice to go in whatever direction we were to choose.

In my pre-teens I took this further and, I imagine, was the source of many post-bedtime chats. I refused to wear dresses, shaved my head and dyed the remaining fringe pink, wore boys swim trunks over my one-piece suits, and shopped in the boy’s department of Kohl’s. Throughout all of this, my mom and dad didn’t blink. They didn’t tell me what to wear or how to act, they let me do my own thing.

Recently, I’ve been trying to grow my nails out. I will have to cut them before ski season so that my gloves fit properly, but I like the look of a nail that isn’t cut so short that it bleeds, a look I cultivated to perfection for years. To be fair, I’m basically failing. Today, for instance, I broke the nail on my left pointer-finger while changing into jeans in a bathroom stall in NYC’s Penn Station. The point is, that letting me wear cargo pants and  Transformers t-shirts didn’t destroy me as a woman and growing my nails or hair out isn’t restoring the girl in me, she never left. I didn’t turn into the boy that I never wanted to be in the first place, I had just been being me.

The roles we ascribe to male, female, and the more recently recognized and ambiguous ‘other’, beyond simple biological function, have always confused me. I believe that  this is because I, with my parents support, never followed them to begin with. I never worried about being lady-like or seeming too boyish but have found a balance that I am happy with. I have turned in the cargo pants for skinny jeans, Kohl’s t-shirts for blouses, and am decidedly not grossed out at the thought of kissing a boy.

I am a female who is still figuring out what it means to be a woman. I am thankful for the fact that I was never handed a definition, I was empowered to create my own.