The following piece was produced through OffTheBus, a citizen journalism project hosted at the Huffington Post and launched in partnership with NewAssignment.Net. For more information, read Arianna Huffington's project introduction. If you'd like to join our blogging team, sign up here. If you're interested in other opportunities, you can see the list here.

When I was a teenager, my mother took to leaving a book called My Mother, Myself, by Nancy Friday, around the house. My mother had three teenage daughters at the time, but one day, I counted five separate copies of My Mother, Myself around the house. Because I knew I was supposed to read the book, I never did, although, simply by virtue of the title, I imagined the contents. My imagined contents aren't far from the synopsis on Amazon.com: "Friday investigates a generational legacy and reveals the conflicting feelings of anger, hate, and love the daughter's hold for their mothers -- and why they so often "become" that mother themselves." That thesis didn't describe my life; by the time I was 30, I had come to admire in my mother precisely the qualities I didn't possess and probably never will. I think it was this reason, during the AFL-CIO sponsored labor debate when Hillary Clinton said, "I'm your girl," the phrase "My Hillary, Myself" popped into my head and hasn't gone away.

As far as I can tell, the only qualities I share with Hillary Clinton are gender, race, a Methodist upbringing, and thick calves and ankles -- the type of legs that, in my South Side Chicago neighborhood, were referred to as "piano legs" (as in "Girl, you got some big piano legs on you"). Even our solutions to that latter problem are different -- I fear the pantsuit even more than I fear high heels. Leaving aside that I've never before had to factor in the fashion implications of a potential president, there are other ways in which thinking about Hillary Clinton is more uncomfortable than thinking about any of the other candidates on the debate stage. Although I am not of the belief that choosing a president on whether or not you would feel comfortable sharing a beer or a sandwich with a candidate is good criteria for choosing a president, it is still unnerving for me to feel that I would be more comfortable sitting down with any of the other presidential nominees, (including Gravel, who reminds everyone of at least one relative) than I would Hillary Clinton, someone my 1979 women's studies class would have referred to as a sister.

I went to college in the late seventies, and attended women studies classes and read Marilyn French's The Women's Room, and Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's, "The Yellow Wallpaper." I hung out with women who taught the men they wouldn't marry -- and yet were somehow defined by -- not to call them girls. Women who misguidedly believed that unshaven legs and armpits were a political statement. Women who proudly called themselves feminists.

Somewhere across the United States, Hillary Clinton, a decade older, was ensconced in another brand of feminism, one thoroughly emerged in a male world, in a career as a lawyer, and married to an equal in intellect and ambition. While I was continually cautioning myself with the Joni Mitchell line, "all romantics meet the same fate, sometimes cynical and cruel and boring someone in some deep dark café," Hillary Rodham was naming her daughter after a Joni Mitchell song. A few years later she was renaming herself Rodham Clinton.

I didn't know Hillary Rodham Clinton existed until she popped up during her husband's campaign wearing a headband. She had her Tammy Wynette gaffe when she said she wasn't some little woman standing by her man, and then appears to me again in memory dancing at the presidential inauguration with her husband. During the dance, she whispered something in his ear, and my friend Mary said, "she just told him how much she loved him." The ballroom dream dies hard, but it did die. During the Whitewater investigation after Vince Foster committed suicide and others around the Clintons starting going to jail, and upending careers, I started to think of them as Tom and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, a golden couple, whose golden lives went on while others around them crumpled. As Nick Carraway observed of Tom and Daisy, "they were a careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made..." At that time I appropriated that sentiment when I observed the Clintons.

But I simultaneously thought both Clintons seemed like good parents and that she, in particular, seemed about as careful as you get. Thus began the maddening process of trying to characterize the couple and the individual, where nothing is ever as it first seems, and where looking at the Clintons somehow comes back to the self -- it's like taking a Rorchardt test through a kaleidoscope. And the learning curve for the test got even steeper during the Lewinsky trial -- Hillary Rodham Clinton was a woman who seemingly had made the same kind of personal concessions that Jackie Kennedy had made 30 years before. Even if the marital agreement allowed for sexual indiscretions, certainly the duel career plan didn't allow for risky one in an atmosphere where there was a right-wing conspiracy. Ann Landers would have said "Wake up. Smell the coffee. Throw the bum out," and my own mother would have added, "get on with your life." What are we supposed to make of that fact that from all public appearances Clinton didn't look like a woman making compromises, and, at the very least, her career went on just fine. Is this movement? Is it feminist? Is it French? Is this, perversely, what a strong marriage looks like?

Whatever it was, I spent considerable time thinking about how her demeanor was a stark contrast to the way I could have behaved in the situation, at which point I recognized I had let Hillary Clinton into my world; as soon as you have to start denying something, you've claimed it somehow. It was also the point I realized I was probably jealous of the Hillary Clintons of the world. Imagine walking through the world with pragmatism as your shield, rather than romanticism as your cloak. But I think even other pragmatic women might be jealous of her -- her pragmatism beats everyone else's, and in even in the marriage that no longer looks enviable, there are worse fates. She may have gotten a cad as a husband, but she got a charismatic, good-looking cad.

Jealousy is not the only uncomfortable wave women surf toward the Hillary shore: during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, those of us with utopian ideals of sisterhood were finding out that there was a certain type of woman who could be more difficult, and trickier than most men, and in the work world, we didn't always see this archetype coming, because she could pose as a mentor. We may have to work with such women, but we don't have to vote for one. And in a New York Times article about Clinton shunning Obama there is some evidence to suggest she is not only "your girl" but "a mean girl." These are the kind of women I stay as far away from as I can in my professional and personal life. But the qualities of a mean girl are not necessarily bad qualities for a president to have.

And therein lies the rub. I will not be supporting Hillary Clinton in the primaries, and this doesn't have to do with any of the inner grappling I have with her: I don't admire either her vote on the Iraq war or her refusal to admit it was wrong. Big Business, as declared by Fortune magazine, loves her. I don't like the idea of dynasties or that the first woman president will have gotten there by an opening through marriage, even though marriage was only an entry way. Her own talents have kept her on the stage. Which is why, if she wins the nomination, I will probably go to work for her. She is prepared for the job, and I think, as a society, we are hungry for a woman to break the presidential barricade. In spite of myself, I get a little thrill when I see both Obama and Edwards trying to man up to her. And I am both proud and sad that of all the viable candidates up on that debate stage, Hillary Rodham Clinton seems like she would be the best president in the worst way.

The above piece was produced through OffTheBus, a citizen journalism project hosted at the Huffington Post and launched in partnership with NewAssignment.Net. For more information, read Arianna Huffington's project introduction. If you'd like to join our blogging team, sign up here. If you're interested in other opportunities, you can see the list here.