The loneliness of that realization, that my daughter might have to shoulder the consequences of these stigmas, made me heartsick. I'd made myself believe she would only be challenged by her race and gender, not the basic ability to speak her mind.

Toddlerhood is a challenging stage. My daughter has the newfound ability to express her wants, needs and excessively irrational, endless, countless, infinite demands with words, yet lacks the decency to keep it to herself.

When I told my daughter that Delaware passed gay marriage this week, she was puzzled. "Why don't they already have it?"

You do more pretend cooking in a miniature kitchen than you do actual cooking in the full-sized one (and frankly, you're not sure which meals taste better).

If we could somehow time-travel and meet our mothers when they were 8-year-olds who were afraid of thunder storms, or college students in love with the wrong man, or young mothers-to-be awaiting our births, all that we believe that we know would likely replaced by a different vision.

Let's teach our daughters to celebrate other women's strength, success and happiness. Let's not limit their options.

I am not suggesting that a little lip gloss at age 12 is a dreadful thing. I am talking about extremes here.

Realizing the vastness of things, the number of people here and gone and still to come, doesn't make my sorrow fade, nor does it temper the exquisite joy of making the house ring with the peals of my daughters' delighted laughter. What it does is it lets me breathe.

Senior year of high school is a mixed bag. It's not Santa's gift bag, but is instead a bag full of emotional joys, disappointments, separations and boredom. Yes, boredom.

If I had to choose, I'd take the physical exhaustion of boys over the emotional exhaustion of girls ANY DAY.

Was it a place she wrote about what worries her? Is she describing her scary dreams at night? With a heavy, worried heart, I unlocked her diary to see what was inside. What did I find?

How do I raise my baby girl to love -- or, at the very least, not to hate -- the same features I have picked apart for so long?

Just when I thought that I had heard it all, I learned about yet another disturbing trend among our teen girls. Teen girls are now afraid of having a hip dip -- a slight curve on the outside of their upper thighs.

We build forts and construct a mix of productivity and levity. Some days, these actions are steeped in a kind of guilt. Is it guilt that I am not working? Guilt that I am? Or is the truth that I am not trying to have it all and that I am simply working on and with what I do have?