Womanhood in through the looking glass.

I have vague, early memories of pink and purple clothing, of big bows, of stick-on earrings. Was this actual preference or merely the influence of my mother? I don’t know, but it quickly gave way, from the age of about 8 or so on, to a longing desire to become “one of the boys.”

I wore oversized t-shirts, cajoled my grandmother into letting me cut the long, thick hair that flowed down my back all the way up to my chin (more or less in the style I still wear it now), grasped at any opportunity to be on the boys’ team, to be the “spy” in our games of chase. In the diaries I kept in middle and high school I wrote, more than once, about how much I wanted to grow up to be the token girl in a group of guy friends.

When I was a sophomore in college, my roommate told me she had decided not to pursue a degree in math because when she walked into the computer lab on the first day of Calculus 3, our freshman year, she was the only woman in the room. She walked out and didn’t look back.

I hadn’t even noticed until she mentioned it, and thereafter never really gave it more than a passing thought. Not in undergrad, not in graduate school where the disparity was even more pronounced. My friends were all men. I traveled to the Caribbean for a bachelor party and smoked cigar after cigar. My own bachelorette party was four men and one woman, all crammed into a single hotel room, two double beds.

My bosses’ boss recently asked me to sit on a panel at a conference to talk about my experience as a woman who leads men. I agreed, but quickly realized that I’m not sure what I will say, because I have never once thought about it that way.

I have always thought of myself as a person first. Being a woman was little more than an inconvenient fact of biology, with no real bearing on my personality, my perspective, or the way in which I related to people.

And maybe that’s part of what has made this so hard.

Because I desperately want to be a mother. Not a parent, but a mother. I want to give birth, to nurse, to bond in that way that only mothers and their babies can.

Because there are parts of this heartache that only another woman can truly understand, feelings deeply enfolded in the physical and emotional toll of carrying a life inside of you that is suddenly no more.

Because for the first time that I can recall, the fact that I am a woman matters.