When I was pregnant with my first child, and still young enough to be overly invested in my own cleverness and originality, I used to tell people openly that I hoped it would be a boy. “Of course,” I would say. “I will love whoever this is and be grateful either way, but you asked what I’m wishing for, and the honest answer is boy.”

I would give you the even more honest answer if you pressed, which was that I was terrified to have a girl. I have one brother and no sisters, and I always felt more comfortable around boys than girls. If I had a daughter, she might want girly things like the dreaded pink clothing or dance classes attended by other little girls and their <gulp> dance moms. And then there’d be hairstyles, my Lord, the hairstyles, which I was incapable of creating and not inclined to censure. Then she’d grow up and I’d have to teach her all the things, and frankly, I’m not that good at all the things. And what if her friends were petty and horrible? Of course they’d be petty and horrible. I’d be lucky if they weren’t vapid and giggly. I really didn’t think I was up for giggly. And most likely we’d have other kids someday, and then she’d be a a big sister. I’d never had a big sister, but what I’d seen didn’t impress me.

On the day of our first ultrasound, I was nervous. I really wanted to know who this little person was, and I suddenly realized that while I’d been half joking about the gender thing, I actually cared. This day was the defining moment, the big reveal.

Except that it wasn’t. The baby was strategically positioned to hide anything revealing, and the tech told us we’d have to wait another month. Then right at the end, he tilted his head and pointed at the screen. “It’s not clear at all,” he said in Spanish, “but from what I can see, if I had to guess, I would say that it’s a girl. Don’t hold me to that, but that’s what it seems like. But, you know, only paint one wall pink, just in case.”

My heart sank. A girl. Most likely a girl.

True story? That night I cried a little. It was partially from my fear of being a girl mom but mostly, if I was really honest, it was because I’d had a neat little picture in my head of our family (first boy, then girl, then another boy for good measure) and this turned my picture on its head.

I admitted this truth to Nate, and he was sweet and didn’t make me feel guilty for it. He did laugh, though, when I sat up and said, “Screw one pink wall. Boy or girl, this baby is having green walls.”

She had green walls. And stars on her ceiling. And lots of pink clothes. And a little black onesie with baby jeans that made her look like a tiny hipster. And there were no dance classes but the hair struggle was real.

When she was two months old, I was invited to be the visiting missionary at a ladies’ prayer circle. I took my daughter with me. I sat on an overstuffed sofa in a sweet grandmother’s living room and drank tea with a bunch of women in flowery dresses. I couldn’t have been more uncomfortable, except maybe if one them had accidentally seen my tattoo. When the baby fussed, I took her out of her car seat and held her close, and realized that I was once again by myself in a crowd of strange ladies, but I wasn’t alone anymore. “It’s you and me, little girl,” I thought. “We can make it through this.”

We did. We have. And then some. Because, spoiler alert, I had two daughters in the end, and the girl power in our house is set to high.

This fall, our family went for a walk in the woods as we often do. I found myself trailing behind while Nate and Ellie set a slightly faster pace, as they often do. There was this one moment when I looked up and saw her ahead of me and thought how there was nothing more perfect and right than walking behind her. There is something uniquely awesome about having girls in my life who just…get it. I could walk behind that girl forever, watching her move confidently forward into the world.

I won’t lie. There have been a lot of giggles and a lot of tears. There have been a few complicated braids and more nail polish than I ever hoped to see. But I’m eternally grateful that I didn’t get to plan my own life. Because those are the smallest, most insignificant parts of having daughters, these firebrands who fascinate and inspire me. These girls who are my people in any crowd of strangers.

From 2003 to 2007, we lived in a second-story apartment in one of the poorer neighborhoods on the south side of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Both Ellie and Scott were born while we lived in that house, so all my earliest motherhood memories are contained within its cinderblock walls.

There isn’t space here to describe the apartment in detail, but a few relevant facts will be helpful. Our apartment was above a storefront, which at one point contained a verduleria (vegetable store) but while we lived there contained only old rusty equipment, dirt, and cockroaches. When you came in our front door (before walking up the stairs) a door on your left took you into that scary domain. We had a key to that door for two reasons.

One, the fuse box to the whole building was located in the downstairs, and since we blew the very inadequate fuses often, we needed access to it. Two, the water tank for our house was on the roof, two stories above the street, and frequently the water pressure was not great enough to pump water up that high. Out behind the old verduleria a second pump at ground level could get us much-needed water if we went out and manually turned it on for a while. The pump was surrounded by a jungle of weeds and fenced in with old corrugated metal siding that was at least seven feet high. Below the spigot was a barrel of water that, in the summer, was the breeding ground for millions of mosquitos. It wasn’t a fun place to visit, but if you’ve ever had to live without water in your house for more than a few hours, you’ll know why we were thrilled to have the key to this unsavory paradise.

One hot day in the summer of 2005, I strapped Ellie into her high chair with some cooked noodles, cheese chunks, and fruit pieces for her lunch. As I’ve written about before, feeding my baby was a major stressor for me, but I had also discovered that when she was contained and distracted with food, I suddenly had a few precious minutes to accomplish something without her underfoot. That day, I was hoping to tackle the pile of dishes in the kitchen, but when I turned on the sink to get started, I only a few drops gurgled out. The tank was out of water.

I should have taken this as an excuse to sit down instead of washing anything, but I knew that there would be no water until someone flipped on the outside pump, and I was in desperate need of a shower later. So, I checked on Ellie, saw that she was still happily eating, and grabbed the key to run down to the pump.

I hurried through the insect-infested verduleria, used the key to open the back door, pushed through the weeds, and flipped the switch on the pump. Immediately, I could hear it begin to send water up to my house. Slapping away mosquitos, I turned to go back upstairs and saw that the door had swung shut behind me.

And the keys were in the lock on the inside.

As you might have guessed, the door locked automatically. It was metal and one of the only things not rusted in the whole place. There was no way I was getting through it.

At first, I was only mildly annoyed. I knew Nate was working in his office upstairs. His window looked onto our patio which was right above my head. So I yelled for him to help. I yelled and I yelled and I yelled. When my throat started to hurt, I finally conceded that he couldn’t hear me.

Fine, I thought, if he isn’t going to free me, I’ll free myself. I knew on the other side of the fence, the empty lot next door was open to the street. I pushed through the weeds to where some cinderblock were piled by the metal walls of the enclosure. I scrambled up them, and found handholds on the corrugated metal. I tried to pull myself up.

Don’t laugh. For a second it actually seemed possible. Then my arms gave out and I slid down the wall, getting a small scrape from a protruding screw along the way. I ignored it. I was pretty sure my tetanus shot was up to date, and anyway I had more pressing problems. My arms felt shaky from the attempt, sweat was pouring down my back, and the mosquitos were relentless. Plus, my baby was upstairs unattended in her high chair.

I yelled again. I banged on the metal door, hoping the sound would echo up to Nate’s ears. I yelled some more. I even tried to climb out again.

No luck.

Finally, I sat down on the pile of cinderblocks, miserably uncomfortable, worried about Ellie, and completely disgusted by my own stupidity and weakness. It was like a slap in the face of all my capable, independent notions of myself. There I was, trapped in the most ridiculous manner, and completely helpless to do anything about it.

It was everything I hated. Plus mosquitos.

I started to laugh, a little hysterically maybe, but also just incapable of any other reaction to such an absurd predicament.

That’s when I heard Nate call my name.

“Here!” I shouted. “I’m down here! By the pump! I’m locked out!”

It took a few minutes for him to follow my voice onto the patio and understand what I was saying and a few more minutes to get downstairs and unlock the door with the key conveniently waiting for him.

As soon as the door opened, I darted inside, shaking, laughing, crying a little, too, I think. He had Ellie in his arms, perfectly safe but a little mad from being trapped in her chair so long. I knew exactly how she felt.

“I heard Ellie crying and when she didn’t stop, I saw that she was in her chair, and I couldn’t find you anywhere,” Nate said.

I explained what had happened. He laughed at my silly blunder, and I laughed with him. But inside I was shaking, too. I had only been out there maybe thirty minutes, but the adrenalin made it feel like hours.

Well, the adrenalin and the unwelcome reminder that it only takes the stupidest little blunder to render me completely helpless. Being human is such a weird tightrope walk of courage and competence over this chasm of our limitations and frailty. I try not to look down too often.

But when I do, you’d better believe I’m going to laugh. It’s the only way I can keep my balance.

When Ellie (my spunky, fearless, furious oldest child) was four, we moved to a new city in Argentina, along with a couple of other families who were going to work with us. There was a lot going on–I was pregnant and we adopted a puppy–but my first priority after finding everyone a place to live was to figure out where the oldest children were going to go to school.

It was a daunting process.

One of the hardest things about living in another country isn’t the language or the weird customs. It’s that everyone around you knows how the system works, and you don’t have clue. I asked around. I tried some internet research. I drove through the city looking for the schools I had heard about. I discovered it was late to be looking for a school, so my options were limited. I finally found a couple of choices that looked promising.

My daughter was going to be in pre-K, and my friends’ son was going to be in kindergarten. Luckily most places offered both in the same building. We all went to visit the potential new kinder together. It was in the heart of our city, on a bustling street. They buzzed us inside and gave us a tour of the tiny upstairs classrooms. We saw the calendars and colorful posters on the walls, all in Spanish, of course. Our kids trailed after us silently as we chatted with the teachers. My friends, who were new to the country, struggled to ask their questions in limited Spanish. I tried to help translate the answers. It was a pleasant enough experience, but I felt the full weight of what I was doing for the first time.

Even though we’d lived in Argentina Ellie’s whole life and she’d been exposed to Spanish regularly, we spoke English at home. Ellie spoke and understood a handful of Spanish words but mostly, she didn’t understand what people were saying unless I helped her. My daughter, the spunky, talkative four-year-old, was going to go off without me to this strange place where no one spoke her language. They would ask her questions she couldn’t answer. They would tell her what to do and she’d have to figure out what they wanted. She’d be alone in that way you are when there are lots of other people but you can’t quite reach them.

It was only a few days before classes started. We went ahead and registered both kids. I passed the end of summer trying not to think about that one moment in our visit when Ellie’s new teacher asked her what her favorite color was and Ellie just ducked her head and didn’t answer.

The night before Ellie’s first day, she was excited and nervous. I talked cheerfully to her and tried to contain the anxiety that was eating me up inside. I barely slept, thinking of what faced her the next day, imagining how tiring and lonely it would be, worrying that my life choices had put her in a situation that would lead to long-term social insecurities and maybe academic setbacks, too. I tried to remember the truth, that the God who loved her more than I did was always with her and was doing his work in her life, but I kept swinging back to the guilt of asking her to do such a hard thing at such a young age, of sending her to face something that much older people would dread to face.

Day finally came. Heart in hand, my friend and I went together to drop off our children. We drove home fighting back tears.

That afternoon, we went back together to pick them up. We were both so ready to see them, to reassure ourselves that they were okay after a long, undoubtedly confusing day.

Let me just say that I don’t really think the stereotypes about men and women are all true, but that afternoon was like the perfect setup for an out-of-date sitcom.

My friend’s son came out first.

“How was your day?” she asked eagerly.

“Good,” he said.

“Did you like it?”

“Yes,” he said.

Then Ellie emerged.

“How was your…” I began.

“It was so great, Mami. They have this playground out back, and we all went out, and I got to climb these monkey bars, and the other girls showed me where the crayons were, and we colored pictures, and they have a snack and it was cookies! And the teacher let me have three and…”

She continued to talk without pause all the way to where we had parked our car. I opened the back door. She climbed in, still talking. I didn’t want to cut her off, so I held the door open for another minute.

Traffic was whizzing by on the busy street. Finally, I had to say, “Hold on one second,” so I could close the door and open mine and hop inside. “Okay, go.”

She went on, telling me every detail of her day all the way home, like every word she hadn’t been able to speak all day was pouring out her at once.

My friend looked at me with wide eyes. Her quiet son happily looked out the window, memorizing the route to his new school. We shook our heads and drove home holding back our laughter.

We still laugh about that day. It may not be a commentary on gender, but it certainly was a good indication of the personalities of our two kids.

Everyone is wired differently, which is a thing I always knew and appreciated. I like variety. I like that we’re all bringing something different to the table. What I never thought about before I had kids was how the personality that God gives us goes hand in hand with the life he has planned for us.

That day didn’t go anything like my son’s first day of preschool. Or my youngest daughter’s either. It didn’t go like my first day of kindergarten so many years ago. That day, with its challenges and its joys, was for Ellie. And she handled it like herself, like the person God made to have that day.

Recently I was talking to Ellie about her high school class schedules and she said, “I just can’t think of any reason not to do the hardest thing I can possibly do.”

I smiled so big. In that moment, I didn’t feel proud of my good parenting or smug about her good qualities. (I’m all too aware of how little control I had over any of that.) I just remembered that terrifying day eleven years ago, the first one on this journey, and I felt amazed at this person God had made, a person designed to do a certain set of very hard things.

I don’t know yet what all those hard things will be, but experience tells me I’ll get to hear about them all in detail.

That will be my favorite part.

Of all the Christmas traditions we’ve tried to institute over the years (that pickle ornament, for example, which seemed so fun but never quite seems to get hidden in the tree) I wouldn’t have guessed the Christmas potato would be one that stuck.

The Christmas potato doesn’t have its basis in quaint folklore or family history. No, it germinated in the well-manured soil of network television sitcoms. I don’t even know which TV show it was. All I know is that the year Ellie was in third grade, a short promo for some family sitcom came on at least two dozen times a day, and the bit that caught our attention was a surly grandma who stalked into the room on Christmas day, tossed an uncooked spud at her grandchild and said, “Here’s your Christmas potato.” My kids thought it was hilarious.

That year, Ellie had moved into a harder math class, and she was a little behind on her math facts. All fall, she had worked hard to memorize her multiplication tables, and by Christmas, she was fully caught up. We had been planning to reward this extra effort with a special present at Christmas: her first iPad. She knew about the reward. It had helped to motivate her in the long memorization process. But still, Christmas is a little more fun if you pretend to be surprised, you know? So we all pretended. Every day, I told Ellie that she’d be getting a Christmas potato. Her dad said she was getting a Christmas potato. We told her siblings she was getting a Christmas potato. We told other family members she was getting a Christmas potato. They laughed, but we stuck to our story. I’m sure no one thought we were weird.

By Christmas morning, I know Ellie was half afraid that it was true. She thought she was getting an iPad. But, I mean, what if it really was just a potato? Or, you know, socks?

Socks, as it happens, also have a special place in our family Christmas traditions. Specifically, stinky socks. When the kids were little, we were determined to teach them gratitude, starting with the fake but polite kind that you express for gifts even when you hate them and extending through to a true understanding of how absolutely privileged their lives are. (The beauty of fake gratitude is that when you’re truly grateful for your life and the people who love you, your gratitude is never really fake because it never had anything to do with the present itself.)

So each year, in the days leading up to Christmas, we would have variations on the following conversation:

Nate: Now what if we are all opening presents and all you get is a half-burned candle? Are you going to cry?

Kids: No.

Nate: Are you going to throw a fit?

Kids: No.

Nate: What are you going to say?

Kids: Thank you so much!

Nate: And what if your cousins all get huge Lego sets and all you get is a stinky sock? What will you say?

Kids: Thank you so much!

Nate: And when we come home, who will take care of you?

Kids: You will.

The stinky sock conversation gets repeated every single year, and even though it’s no longer really needed, sometimes the kids still initiate it, just for fun. They like to vary their answers. (This is the best stinky sock I’ve ever been given! I’ve always wanted a stinky sock!) We try to steer away from too much sarcasm, but I couldn’t totally vouch for our success.

On the Christmas potato morning, we let the kids open all the other presents first. And then, we handed Ellie the special box that had been waiting at the back. I experienced a brief moment of worry. What if, in spite of the preparation, she was super disappointed? What if Christmas morning nerves made her burst into tears? She was barely containing her excitement as she reached into the box and pulled out…a raw potato.

She did cry. Because she was laughing so hard that she couldn’t stop.

We were all laughing. The younger kids may have even fallen on the floor.

When our delight in the Christmas potato died down, we gave her the real gift, of course. She squealed and clutched it to her chest, but even so, it didn’t garner half the excitement of the potato.

Naturally, the iPad got a lot of use over the next few years, but the thing the kids still talk about is the potato. And whenever they reach an age where they know to expect a certain big present for Christmas, they insist that all they want is a Christmas potato.

It turns out that when you trust that someone will give you good gifts, you’re free to laugh at the weird crap that comes with it. In fact, the weird crap becomes a reminder of your certainty that good gifts are still to come. It becomes a reminder of your confidence in this person who loves you.

And on the rare horrible day when all there is is stinky socks, you say thank you even though you don’t really mean it. Because the way you choose to be doesn’t have to depend on the gifts you’re given. And because you know in the end, your dad will take care of you.

When the kids were little, we spent way too much time at McDonalds.

I have no real justification other than to say that the combination of cheap edible food and giant indoor playsets was too enticing to resist. I know most McDonalds don’t have those play places anymore, but fifteen years ago, they were a staple of our life. They even had them in Argentina. They were warm, they felt like home, and they gave our monkey of a daughter the space she needed to climb, climb, climb, climb.

That girl loved to climb. Even when she could barely walk, she’d scoot up the plastic tubes, bracing her bare feet against the sides to get up and out of reach of anyone taller than five feet. That’s why, when she was three and Scott was one, I didn’t think anything of letting him follow her into a set of hollow plastic blocks that rose twenty feet into the air.

At that point, it just seemed like a thing kids did.

What I didn’t calculate was the unique blend of determination and fear that my son inherited from his father. I didn’t plan for him to push himself to his limit. I didn’t know that when he discovered it, his fear would overtake him in a place out of my reach.

We were finishing up our cheeseburgers when Ellie came to tell us that Scott was stuck. The play place had clear plastic sides, so it wasn’t hard to spot him, four blocks up the climbing tower, perfectly safe but also perfectly frozen.

At first it was a little funny. He wasn’t crying and he wasn’t in any danger. He was just a little guy, laying his chubby cheek against the blue mat and holding perfectly, and I mean perfectly, still.

It seemed like an easy problem to solve. We sent Ellie up to encourage him. We called up to tell him that he was safe, that we were right out here and he could climb down to us. That we wouldn’t let him fall. Ellie tried to show him the way. Scoot back. Dangle one leg down. Find the step with your foot. Climb down.

It wasn’t enough. He didn’t move. We could see in, and he could see out. He could see how high he was. He could not convince his brain that he was not about to die.

We tried comforting him. We tried coaxing him. We tried commanding him. We offered incentives like ice cream and a trip to the dollar store. We tried waiting a bit.

But his fear was just too great.

So, finally, Nate folded himself up and squeezed into that play place. Ellie and I watched from below as he slowly made his way up to where Scott was clinging to the blue plastic step. When he arrived, he started to talk, his voice too low for me to make out the words.

They were there for a long time. So long that Ellie and I ran an errand and then came back for them. When we arrived, we saw Nate helping Scott off of the bottom step.

They had come down together.

I used to think of myself as someone with very little fear. But now I think maybe Scott didn’t get that blend of determination and fear only from his father. Maybe I also push myself to my limits and then find that I want to cover my eyes and pretend that I’m not where I am.

I can’t tell you how many times I have needed someone to calmly reassure me, to talk me through each step so that I can move again.

I can tell you that shouting instructions from a distance doesn’t help. It’s the quiet voice, the person you trust who’s drawn close, that makes a difference in the end.