Let's take for granted the current common assumption that half of our personalities are accounted for by genes (nature), and the other half by environment (nurture). What portion of nurture is under my control? If we start off with 50%--then at most I'm half of that, since she also has a father--so 25%. And then there are other relatives she sees regularly--now I'm down to maybe 20%. There's daycare; she's there for 40 hours out of a weekly total of 168, about a quarter. So now my influence is reduced to 15%.

There's television; even her Baby Einstein videos have values. There's other people at the mall. There's her toys, her books, our friends. What percentage am I left with? How much can I really influence the person my daughter will become?

It's so depressing when I look at the mound of toys sitting on the mat in our living room and see that all of the people are white; all of the girls are wearing pink skirts; the boys are holding sports equipment and frogs while the girls are holding kittens and purses. What is this going to teach her about the world? About her options? About what kind of person she is expected to be?

I watch and listen to myself and am amazed at how hard I find this--how easily and automatically "he" slips out as the label for every toy that could be either. Her stuffed toys in particular tend to be called "he" even if I've already made a conscious decision to act as if they're female by giving them a girl's name. I've learned how deeply I've internalized this myself, seeing male as "default" and female as "other."

When she falls over and cries and I rush to pick her up, I wonder--would I go so fast if she were a boy? When I help her climb the stairs or maneouver over my legs or hand her back a toy she pitched across the room, I wonder, would I expect her to do that by herself if she were a boy? My somewhere-under-ten-per-cent of influence--am I using it well?

She is such a feminine little person--not in a girly-girl everything-pink-and-ruffles kind of way, but her innate temperament. So far. A little shy, quiet, willing to sit still, loving, sociable, sweet, gentle. Has she been helped towards that or would she be this way anyway?

And yes, I realize that this is a comparative luxury I have, to worry about whether sexism will clip my daughter's wings rather than break her back. No one is asking me to perform a clitoridectomy on her; no one is telling me to break and mangle her little feet; no one told me that because she was a girl I should leave her on a hillside to die.

One of the most haunting images I saw in Hrdy's Mother Nature was one of a mother in India with her year old twins, one a boy and one a girl. She'd been told to give her milk and time only to the boy, to ensure he thrived, so the girl was given to the grandmother to raise. And side by side with their mother you saw them in this photograph, the boy a plump thriving hefty baby, the way a year-old is supposed to be; the girl barely over 7 lbs, so starved had she been for food and love that she'd hardly grown at all. I remember a story, too, of a woman in one culture who already had many daughters and was pregnant again and gave birth--to another girl. So angry and disappointed she was at being burdened with another girl that she named her "Wants to Die" and waited for it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In both cases I was struck not only by the pain and sorrow of these two poor girls treated with so little love and care, no one to cherish them, celebrate their milestones, give them love and smiles--but the sheer strength and resilience that led them to live and grow at all in such an environment. And the stupidity and blindness that insisted still in seeing them as weaker and lesser because they were female, when there was so much evidence otherwise.

So no, no one is asking me to kill or maim my little girl. But that doesn't mean I should be grateful that I am "only" being asked to crush her in smaller ways, and left to wonder whether or not I'm resisting as well as I'd wanted.

Am I failing her?

I don't imagine this is a question unique either to me or to feminist mothers in general. We all come to parenthood with so many ideas of the kinds of families we want to create and the kinds of mothers we want to be. Our intentions are already so high and they get blown out to the stratosphere with the advice of helpful "experts" who will gladly tell you how to be a perfect mother, with no acknowledgement whatsoever that this isn't possible or that anything less is acceptable.

Am I failing her?

In Mother Reader there was an essay from a woman whose first child was born in the days when scheduling of babies was the Advice du Jour. So scheduled her firstborn daughter was, and she wrote of how she would sit and cry while her breasts leaked milk to hear her daughter wail in hunger until the appointed time to eat. She wrote of how her husband abandoned them, and so she had to work, and this was in the days before people understood how important it was to have a good, loving, stimulating environment for young minds--so her daughter was warehoused in a daycare with far too many other babies and children and far too little to do.

She wrote of how she could see the effects of these experiences in her little girl as she grew up; how she felt that, on some fundamental level, she'd failed her, even though it was the best she could do and what the experts said was right at the time.

It's possible to scoff at the Perfect Mother, to tell yourself that all you need is to be Good Enough--but what's Good Enough? The extremes are easy to identify: Abuse and neglect, bad; 100% freshly prepared organic foods and hand-sewn unbleached cotton diapers, unnecessary. Where in between do you draw the line? How do you know when the experts are right, or when they're over the top with unnecessary advice, or when they're advocating something harmful?

It can feel like a Looney Tunes episode where one of the characters runs off a cliff and keeps running on thin air until they make the mistake of looking down and seeing that there's nothing underneath them. I can be confident of what I'm doing and the choices I've made as long as I don't ask myself for evidence.

And then again, who wants to be merely Good Enough? I want to give my daughter everything she needs from me and a little bit extra, so she'll know how much she was loved. I want to give her the tools to examine the world critically, so she'll know when to trust its messages and when to tune them out. I want to give her a love for herself that is strong enough to know when she is being taken advantage of or when someone's love for her isn't real. I want to give her enough strength and resilience to take the blows she gets, get up and keep going. I want to give her a sense of entitlement to her emotions, good and bad; to respect and courtesy from other people. There is so much I want to give her, and I don't know if I have it to give.