Last winter, two of my closest friends gave birth to baby girls within a week of each other. I am nearing 30 but lucky enough to still count my circle of girlfriends from college as my best friends, despite no longer living alongside one other in shoe-box-sized dorm rooms that smell faintly of coffee and feet. When we learned they were pregnant, the first thing we did was supply each of them with a library’s worth of girl power baby books—books like Feminist Baby, Nevertheless She Persisted, and I Am So Brave.

My contribution was This Little Trailblazer: A Girl Power Primary, by Joan Holub, a brightly colored board book about girls:

paving the way
to a future that’s bright,
helping the world
with their skills, smarts, and might.

As their due dates drew closer, we in this circle wrote letters to each baby, not to be opened until their 13th birthdays. We filled pages upon pages with what we want them to know (or perhaps, what we wish we had known) when they begin to navigate the complexity of womanhood.

I want them to know everything. At the same time, I want them to know nothing.

I want them to know the power of being at home and in charge of their bodies, but I don’t want them to experience anything like the week I spent on the couch weeping into fast food wrappers after watching Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testify before congress. I don’t want them to know the howl that shook my petite frame on election eve 2016, or the fear that ran hot and sour through my veins any time I was in public for weeks afterwards, unsure of what our national decision meant for bodies like mine.

I want them to pursue a career or calling that makes their eyes light up and heart beat fast, but I don’t want them to feel what I felt at my first real job, where I overhead a man say he couldn’t promote our female colleague because she was too busy rearing children to handle additional responsibilities. I don’t want them to know that in grad school I was usually the only woman in the room and calculated my contributions to class discussions with the kind of precision that took astronauts to the moon, not wanting an uninformed comment to confirm suspicions that I didn’t belong.

I want them to have a robust understanding of sexuality that gives them the language to shamelessly communicate what they want (and unapologetically what they don’t), but I won’t relay that the first time a friend told me she was raped, neither of us knew to call it that (I was frozen, he was drunk, I didn’t say no). But I won’t describe the visual display I helped create in college representing the number of sexual violence survivors on campus, about which a man old enough to be my father spent 20 minutes berating me for, questioning the legitimacy of the data I used, accusing me of “making the community look bad.”

I want them to revere every soft fold and strong muscle of their bodies, only speaking to themselves as they would to someone they love. I do not want them to know the hunger I allowed to eat away at my pubescent hips the summer I was 14.

I want them to walk into a room and feel entitled to take up space, to be the funniest, smartest or most creative person there, if that’s what they are. I will not detail the countless women I know who have shaved off pieces of themselves to make men want them. I will not describe the concern in the kind eyes of family members as they mention that if I “toned it down” a bit, Sarah sweetheart, potential male suitors might be less intimidated by me.

Or maybe I will tell them everything.

Until then, I will line their bookshelves with stories of courageous women who defied odds and blazed trails. I will fill pages with the wisdom that was passed down from my mothers and sisters, in the hopes that one day they will do the same for the women entrusted to their care.

For now, I will bounce them on my hips, and attempt to live in such a way that when they ask, in the words of poet Chinaka Hodge—

“Where were you? Did you fight? Were you fearful or fearsome? What colored the walls of your regret? What did you do for women in the year it was time? This path you made for me, which bones had to break? Did you do enough, and are you OK, momma? And are you a hero?”

I will be able to respond—

“Daughter, I stood there with the moment drawn on my face like a dagger, and flung it back, slicing space for you.”