Shannon is a fellow mother of four who has a background in adult education (and isn’t afraid to use it). Her son has Asperger’s, and she’s outspoken and frank about her views on autism and vaccines. She’s got the oh-so-straightforward and hilarious view on What To Expect When You’re Expecting that only an experienced mother can have. She’s a smart, no-holds-barred blogger and someone you need to get to know.

Welcome, Shannon!

Today I had a good laugh at the food court in the mall with my mother and my daughter and I’m not going to lie, it was pretty much the best feeling ever.

It was crowded and very loud and I was trying to get my mother’s attention because I needed her to pass me some napkins as the baby had just dumped taco salad all over himself, so I said, “Mom!” But she didn’t hear me, so I repeated myself, more loudly this time. Still she didn’t hear, so I shouted, “MOM!”

As my mother was handing me the napkins, my two-and-a-half year old daughter remarked with obvious shock and bewilderment, “That’s your MOM?”

My mother and I instantly began to laugh. My daughter has obviously heard me call her grandma “Mom” many times, but I guess it had never dawned on her that her grandma is actually my mother. Of course, she is two and she can’t possibly comprehend that I was once a little girl with chubby cheeks and blond pigtails just like hers.

It felt so wonderful to be sitting in that food court having a good laugh with my mother and my beautiful little girl. It reminded me of how happy I am to have a daughter and how I almost didn’t have one.

Our first two children are boys, which is great because I love being the mother of sons. One day I will write a piece about all the amazing things about mothering boys that I didn’t know about until my sons were born. However, when we were expecting our third child, I really hoped that we would have a daughter.

That’s a tricky thing these days because when you have two boys and you are pregnant again, everybody from the supermarket cashier to the drycleaner will ask you if you are hoping for a girl. The politically-correct response is, “Of course it doesn’t matter to me if it’s a boy or a girl. We just hope for a healthy baby of either gender.” There is some truth in that – if I had had another boy, I would probably be sitting here writing about how eye-opening it is to raise boys, how affable they are, how they don’t take setbacks personally, how genuine they are in their affections.

But deep-down I was hoping for a girl. I dreamt of braiding her hair with those yarn-like ribbons my mother used to put in my hair. (But those ribbons went out of style in 1977 and are impossible to find.) I had visions of sitting down at my sewing machine and whipping up a half dozen dresses and pantsuits each September like my mother used to do. (And if I ever figure out how to thread the machine, I just might do that – but probably not.)

In fact, when I think of all of the reasons that I wanted a daughter of my own, it always comes back to re-creating all of the best memories of my childhood that I shared with my own mother. I know that some of what she taught me came from her own mother and I know that some of what I teach my daughter will be passed onto my granddaughter. We are lined up together, like beads on a string of pearls for all of time.

I look forward to taking her shopping for a grad dress (and much, much, later, for a wedding dress). I will show her how to apply the right amount of makeup to enhance her natural beauty without looking like a reject from a casting call for Dynasty.  I will make sure that she reads Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood and that she understands the debt she owes to the suffragettes and feminists of generations past. I will teach her to value her friendships with women. I will show her that it is not a mistake to expect much from men because the truth is that most of the time when we show people that we have high expectations for them, they rise to meet these expectations.

I know that I will have as many failures as successes and that there will be years that I am an embarrassment to her, when she will not want to be seen with me, when she will regard my fashion advice and my warnings about the precariousness of gender equality to be outdated and irrelevant. I will be the one to tell her when she is setting her sights too low, selling herself short in love or career, so it may not always be easy between us.

But I also know that on the other side of that abyss is a friendship that will last a lifetime. I am counting on my girl to be the one person in the world who will remind me to get my chin waxed and who will always make sure that I have a lunch date on my birthday.

One day she may call me “Mom” and a little pig-tailed girl I have yet to meet may ask, “That’s your MOM?” And I will proudly answer, “Yes, I am her mom.”

You can follow Shannon as @VanderLovely on Twitter and subscribe to her blog.