Still mulling over my fantastic girl Gracie. I found an old editorial by Anna Quindlen in my files, which of course made me cry yet again. Some excerpts:

“Sixteen years ago something unexpected happened: I became the mother of a daughter. … Having a daughter can be a complex matter for a woman. Despite those who burble about someone to shop and chat with, the truth is that in their search for self, girls challenge their mothers in a way that boys rarely do. The ruling principle of burgeoning female identity seems to be a variation on Descartes: I am not my mom, therefore I am. Prudence Quindlen’s revenge, my father used to call our youngest child, figuring she would give me the agita that I had given my own gentle mother. But Maria has done something for me that I never anticipated. She made me want to be a etter woman.
If I were pressed for one word to describe my only daughter, it would be courageous. Swimming underwater at 2, jumping off a diving board at 3, barreling off a 40-foot cliff into the Caribbean in Negril at 5 as drunken college students cheered – that’s my wild, brave girl.
…. She makes me believe in evolution. She’s an authentic human being in a way I was not at 16, less good girl, more real person. She and her wonderful group of friends deal with one another more honestly and productively than I did at the same age. It took me decades to learn what these girls seem to understand intuitively: not to confuse disagreement and rupture, conflict and loss of love.
They’ve hit the ground running because of the changes in the lives of women. The culture grants them opportunities that were once male-only, but it still gives to girls with one hand and takes back with the other. I wonder sometimes about the trade-offs: aprons for eating disorders, strictures for stress, limits for deceptively limitless choices. Still, while my mother’s generation couldn’t even imagine certain freedoms and my generation grew up fighting for them, liberation is the birthright of this group of young women. You can feel it in their strength.
Each wave of feminism has believed in something called the New Woman. The woman who could vote, who could work, who could be truly free. I am the mother of the New Woman. She doesn’t waste a lot of time tailoring the cut of her character to suit the demands of a world that has always had mediocre taste. She never milks her gender, and she is not cowed by guys. She has taught me to dare more and conform less, to cut down on my hypocrisy because she shames me by seeing right through it. Being her mother is like playing basketball with a crack player; she raises the level of the game of life just by showing up….
My hope and my dream for the future of women comes trudging up the stairs every afternoon, her hair bundled into a bun. Last year she gave almost a foot of it away to make a wig for a kid going through chemo, but she mourned her lost length tearfully for a week afterward. Don’t get me wrong: she’s no saint. But she is strong and smart and funny, everything I’ve ever treasured. Oh, if I could grow up to be Maria, to be the kind of person who could jump off that cliff without thinking twice or looking down. For decades my role model was my mother. Now it’s my daughter. I’m just the woman who was lucky enough to come between the two.”