Who am I, and what am I doing here?

I spent my entire childhood dreaming of beautiful tutus, my hair perpetually kinked from spending hours every day in a bun, and twirling around to Tchaikovsky and Schubert. I would wear my Victorian dress from the 1st Act of The Nutcracker around my house and pretend I lived in a far away time, where girls wore big bows in their long curly hair. When I was in High School, I performed beautiful pas de deuxs in glittering tutus and pointe shoes, wearing sparkling tiaras that I created, sitting on top of perfectly formed buns. When I went to college, I decided to pursue a career in science and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Molecular Biology, and a minor in Biochemistry. For 4 years of college, I immersed myself in genetic codes, and biochemical reactions. I took classes in anatomy, immunology, and microbiology because I was fascinated with a world no one could see. When I wasn't studying, I was designing costumes for a costume shop on campus. I would spend my afternoons on a sewing machine creating garments for plays and musicals. My first job out of college was running a DNA sequencer at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where the fabric of who we are was dissected down to a repeating code of just 4 molecules. While there, I completed a Master's degree in Biotechnology from Hopkins and landed a job in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of MD School of Medicine. I entered the fascinating world of the human mind, where one small event during fetal development could change how the axons of the brain were wired together. I would breed mice that would spin in circles until they died, or were missing entire portions of their brain. I would section and stain hundreds, maybe thousands of fetal mouse brain tissue to study how connections from one place to another weaves the very fabric of what makes each one of us unique. When my son was born, I left the world of in situs and immunostaining for diapers and newborn cuddles. As a SAHM, I became the antithesis of everything that I thought I was trying to prove as a woman. A woman who could do anything she wanted. I was surprised and frustrated that I enjoyed the things that I tried so hard to dismiss for the first 25 years of my life. The X chromosome in me was once again bubbling to the surface and I instead of ignoring and fighting it, I embraced it. As my son approached his first birthday, I dusted off my sewing machine and started creating things that seemed to have been hiding in the back corners of my brain for years. I would cut and fold the fabric without even thinking, and the result was anything and everything imaginable. I would look at a picture of something I liked, and immediately dissect it in my mind. I'd take out my paper and fabric and recreate anything I wanted. With the help of the internet, I turned my hidden talents into a new career, while being a typical housewife and mom. I had come full circle and I LOVED IT. Why had I denied this beautiful facet of who I was? Why had I gotten caught up in trying to make the feminists before me proud, that I had completely forgotten how amazing being a woman really was? We can do anything and be anyone we'd like. We have finally achieved what centuries of woman before could only dream about, complete autonomy over our lives. We could be doctors, and lawyers, AND mothers AND, well, WOMAN. Why should we feel guilty being feminine, just because of how hard the woman that came before us fought for our equality? What if we aren't equal? What if embracing X makes us BETTER than we could have ever imagined? What if the feminist movement had pushed so hard for us to be viewed as equals, that we lost the one thing that set us apart from who we were trying to compete with? Can we have it all? Can we be bold, and inspired intellectuals, while wearing a skirt? Why do we stifle the X in favor of what we think we want? What if we can get what we want, while bringing EVERYTHING the woman of the past brought with them? Can we be nurturing mothers, and strong pioneers, and progressive feminists all wrapped into one?