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"Mommy! Look!" My daughter, 5 years old, is yelling at me from the backseat.

"Honey, I'm driving," I tell her. "I will look in a sec." I think about also explaining that she doesn't need to yell - the space between her mouth and the back of my head is, at max, eight inches - but math isn't her forte yet, and I haven't had enough coffee to fully engage yet.

"MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY. LOOK." All sorts of things that she could want me to see run through my head, a ticker tape of possible horrors. She's puked. She's peed. She's pooped. She's blown her nose down her shirt. She's opened the window and threw her pants out of it. Or sh** - I think, remembering her little brother is next to her - she's opened the window and thrown him out of it. Or worse , even, than all of that: she wants to show me that he's fallen asleep, knowing the five-minute nap in baby-math in the car means he won't fall asleep again for three full days. Maybe math is her forte after all.

We reach a stop sign, thank sweet Jesus, and I turn around in my seat to see her.

And it's none of those things. It's her belly. She's holding up her shirt, pointing. "It's my belly! Isn't it great?"

I turn back around (shout out to yoga for making that 180 possible) and drive on, grinning. "It sure is, baby. It sure is. Don't let your brother fall asleep."

She loves her body. Like, really loves it, the kind of loving that all the self-help gurus and yoga teachers and body image experts try to teach us. She runs around, belly out, excited with the sheer joy of being able to move and dance and flop and jump. She even flops and rolls and kicks and dances in her sleep, next to me in my bed, errant fists and feet and belly landing in my face.

I don't know where this came from, but I know enough to know it didn't come from me. I've spent a decade now trying to walk the line between doing enough yoga to find enlightenment and doing enough stomach crunches to still be able to zip up my jeans.

Maybe she learned it from her older sister, whose confidence is less in-your-face and instead strong and silent, enough to be the only girl on her little league team who can hold court with boys twice her size. I couldn't care any less about baseball - watching it is like watching paint dry but with more spitting and ball scratching - but I could watch that one on the field all day long, her curls hanging down her back, long enough now to cover half of the number five on her jersey. "Maybe we should braid your hair before the games," I said to her one evening when she came home all sweaty and hat-headed.

"Eh. It's not like anyone else on the team has braids," she said, shrugging.

I couldn't argue.

I've been thinking about these two ladies a lot lately, wondering if I've had it wrong all these years when I made proclamation after proclamation to my husband starting as soon as I found out I was going to have a girl. I'm going to teach them to be strong, I'd say. I'm going to teach them to love themselves. I'm going to teach them to eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full and learn to love to move in their bodies because it feels good and not because they want to target a trouble zone. I'm going to teach them to chant "fight the patriarchy!" while we burn our bras (that let's face it, odds are they won't need them anyway since they're my daughters) and bust through the glass ceiling and demand equal pay for equal work and paid family leave and the rights to do whatever with these beautiful, loved bodies what they wish.

I'm going to teach them.

Ha.

Having kids is funny, right? I haven't had to teach them any of these things, not once, not yet. They came out and inherently loved their bodies and perhaps even more amazingly, they loved MINE, especially in the soft places that I still struggle to own. They instinctively wanted to move and fought to learn how and still haven't stopped, and I know they're not doing it so they can track the calories in their Fitbit later and justify that second scoop of ice cream. Also, to them, that ice cream is just that: ice cream. It isn't love and naughtiness and wounds and numbness and something they will have Catholic guilt over eating long after the taste has faded from their mouths. They eat when they are hungry and they stop when they are full and if I told them what the patriarchy was and how hard they might have to work to achieve their dreams just because they have a uterus, they would look cross-eyed at me because WHY WOULD SUCH ABSURDITY BE ALLOWED TO EXIST ANYWAY?

So I've been trying to amend my best-laid raising-girl plans. Maybe my goal here isn't to teach them those things at all, but rather to help them hold as tight as they can to what they came out naturally knowing. Maybe my job is to soften the blows of the universe and keep these girlies alive and eager and from closing up tight around their wounds like I did, like so many of us did, getting bitter and hard where we used to be wide-eyed and soft.

Maybe. I don't really know yet.

But it was hot last night, the first truly steamy night of the year, and the older one let me braid her heavy hair so she could sleep without it on her neck. I brushed, and her shoulders shook, and I realized she was crying.

"What's wrong, baby?" I asked her, wheeling her around on the bed to face me. Again, the ticker tape of tragedy flew through my head. She was teased, she was bullied, she hated her teacher, her friends, her hair. She was in love, or out of love, or God forbid: pre-menstrual.

But it wasn't any of that,either. "It's going so fast," she said. "Fourth grade is almost over. Baseball is almost over. Being nine is almost over. Everything keeps changing."

Ugh. She sounded like me. It was like being punched in the belly because I realized that THIS is what I have taught her.

"I know, baby," I said, tucking an errant curl behind her ear. "I SO know. Everything is always changing. And it's the most beautiful and most terrifying thing in the whole world."

She nodded and sighed, looking three decades older. Looking like me.

Maybe there was still something to teach her. I got excited. I got preachy. "You know what I think, baby? I think there are really only two things. There is love, and there is fear. Everything else is just flavors of those."

"Like ice cream?"

"Yes. Exactly like ice cream. And maybe change is both. Change is fear, because it's new and unknown, but it's also love. Because I don't think change would be scary if we weren't so in love with our lives."

"Like we wouldn't be sad if we weren't happy?" she asked.

"YES. Exactly. Like that. "

Clearly I didn't have to teach her a damn thing.

She reached out. "Will you lay with me?"

"I'd love to," I said, settling in next to her. When her breath stilled and I knew she was asleep, I tucked the sheets around her, tucked the curl back behind her ear, and leaned in close. "Goodnight, honey," I whispered. Then quieter: "Fight the patriarchy."

I swear I saw her raise her fist under the covers.

- Liz Petrone

Liz Petrone is unequal parts mama, yogi and writer. Also: warrior, wanderer, dreamer, doubter and hot mess. She shares her stories on her blog, http://www.lizpetrone.com, and is pretty sure that doing so has saved her life. Her work has been featured in Blogher, Mamapedia and Yummy Mummy, among others. She lives in a creaky old house in Central New York with her ever-patient husband, their four babies and an excitable dog named Boss. When she should be sleeping, she can often be found instead working on her first full-length project, a memoir. You can find her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.