I really celebrate Women’s History Month, International Women’s Day, etc., (to the extent of annoying my less-feminist acquaintances), and the reason I do has a lot to do with my mother.

Early in life, I learned that my mom, Claire, was a NASA mathematician for a number of years before I was born (Rockwell International, actually, but she worked at the Lyndon B. Johnson Center on space flight missions and shuttles, so… NASA). On their lunch breaks, my mom and her NASA coworker buddies would map out early text-based RPGs using the Space Center’s computers and printers, spreading their patchwork sketch-maps out over two, three, sometimes six cafeteria tables, sending a runner back and forth from the cafeteria tables to the terminal with the text-based game. In 2017, a half-dozen comic book film adaptations combined to top $4b in box-office sales, which can make you forget that nerds/geeks/dorks were actual outcasts for many, many years. The way I have heard it told, NASA/Rockwell/LBJSC was an oasis, where everyone was a nerd — therefore no one was.

After NASA, she attended law school at the University of Houston, graduating near the top of her class (while defraying the cost of tuition by editing other students’ papers at 5 cents a page), and she practiced family law for a number of years until she left to expand her own family when she ‘fell pregnant’ (isn’t that an awful idiom?) with me.

My mother is probably the smartest human being I’ve ever met, and I’ve made it a point in my life to seek out smart people.

She recently left the PCA church she helped to found 15 years ago when it became clear that it would never ordain women or elevate them to teaching positions (such as Pastor or Elder — women were unsurprisingly encouraged to seek service-based positions like Deacon). She homeschooled my middle sister (who, apropos of nothing, is currently studying medicine at Johns Hopkins) and me, providing us with one of the most rigorous, valuable educations I could have received.

She’s funny, confident, aggressive, insightful, articulate and — in a sense — a tough act to follow. We have our differences, but growing up around a woman like my mother (who is, to her credit, pretty demure about her own intellect and capabilities) taught me all kinds of things about what women are or are not. In some ways, mom’s example was a lens through which I could look critically at the depictions of women that pop culture and the media traded in and think, ‘hm, that seems off.’

I have two little sisters. They’re two of the smartest, funniest, most delightful people on the planet, a testament both to their own wonderful natures and my parents’ influence, particularly Mom’s. One result for me, of growing up in a ‘house full of girls,’ as my father often (good-naturedly) said, was that I learned that periods are normal and talking about them is normal, too.

That might seem like a trivial thing, but I don’t think that it is. I didn’t even realize that boys/men were resistant to menstrual talk until I went to college and discovered that I would frequently be the only nominally-male person (see: non-binary) involved in a conversation to not freak out and transform into an absolute child when menstruation was brought up (or, slightly better but originating from the same misogynistic discomfort, go dead silent and awkwardly avoid eye contact).

What I imagine Donald Trump would do if a middle-school-aged Ivanka asked him a question about her period; many guys’ actual, honest-to-god reaction to mentions of menstruation.

I have all kinds of ideas about women, and I’m constantly learning about how accurate, useful and valuable those ideas are, and refining them accordingly. I have plenty still to learn about what it means, and has meant, to be a woman in America, but I’m very open to learning and I’m genuinely curious and happy to listen. I’m interested in women — not just sexually, or even primarily sexually — and I believe I can trace that directly back to being raised by an interesting woman.

Thanks, Mom! I cannot imagine a more valuable gift than being able to — if not understand and perfectly relate to — at least empathize with half of the world’s population.