In my daughter's room there are two cream-colored dressers -- parts of a vintage gold-trimmed set I picked up on CraigsList years ago. One of these chests has clothing crammed in each of its six wood-composite drawers.

The other contains three dead laptops, an unused wireless keyboard, two decommissioned flip phones, a retired cordless phone and -- I'm proud of this one -- a real, live box of a corded telephone -- the kind with the handset across the top -- that we still plug in and use when storms knock out Internet and cellular service in our farmhouse. Also: dozens of half-filled notebooks, discarded receipts, crumpled store advertisements from the recycling bin -- she likes the ones printed in color -- pencils, markers, tape, staplers (plural), and scissors -- especially the damn scissors -- pilfered from other parts of the house. 

Yup, this is my daughter's understanding of 'work' -- something she plays at solemnly, arranging all of the above on her bed like a massive desktop and using her most-grown-up voice to negotiate over the phone, pacing around, her hands adding punctuation to her thoughts as they slice through the air.

"No, that's not what I said, Baby," she says, addressing her bumbling imaginary playmate. "You'll have to un-rase it and do it again. Here, let me show you. Like this."

She learned the pacing and negotiation from her dad, who spends easily 70 percent of his waking day managing cattle, finance, personnel, and a ever-evolving network of contacts by cell phone. Long before his alarm goes off each morning, text messages queue up. He might move a million dollars worth of cattle by texting directions to a cattle trucker, arrange a six-figure draw on our operating line, and trouble-shoot an employee's grievance before the water for his pour-over coffee has come to a boil.

My daughter learned the assembly of the right tools and fierce protection of her work space from me. I'm known to use only certain pens and small-ish notebooks that will lie flat on a writing surface without coercion. I prefer uninterrupted time to myself, with control over the ambient music/atmosphere, to shape my freelance writing, study physiology for Pilates teaching certification, or compose business communications read by hundreds or an important few.

Such is the way we do what we do, as self-employed professionals and business owners. It's subtle -- this distinguishing of activities that amount to our living, since it's rare that we have to be in any designated location to do meaningful professional things. I worry that our daughter might not recognize all we've done to earn this flexibility. In the building of any business there are whole years -- a decade in our case -- in which the work is as intimate and crucial as the act of breathing. You either do it when it demands your attention, or you pay dearly for assuming it can wait.

When we talk about what we do -- which is often -- my husband and I try to emphasize the importance of pursuing something you love, and of humbling yourself to the refinement of your craft.

"You get better at things you practice," we say. "There may always be someone better at it than you, but you can't do your best work without trying, and trying again."

And this week, when she traveled with us to attend an out-of-town meeting to discuss our possible investment of more than half our net worth in a business partnership, we got a glimpse of what our daughter understands.

As my husband and I sat down to negotiations and pulled out our respective notebooks, Eliza unzipped her purple-polka-dotted school bag and opened her 'journal,' a striped pencil with monkey eraser topper ready.

​As the adults turned to profit-and-loss statements and share structures, she doodled and practiced 'cursive,' occasionally whispering in my ear pint-sized questions about the conversation, which was well above her head. I wrote out words using dotted lines so she could trace them, and she put the sentences together under her breath. For an hour she did this without complaint. Only in the last few minutes did she sigh heavily and ask to watch a movie on the iPad -- the entertainment we'd planned for her all along. 

Turns out, she had more important work to do.

As bikini season was heating up here in the Midwest this summer, I read a pro v. con opinion piece on whether letting our young daughters wear two-piece bathing suits is good for their self-image/esteem/confidence. I sense the same question comes out of the closet at Halloween -- a holiday columnist Dan Savage refers to as Heteroween, or straight person pride night (I agree).

First off, let me say that my daughter wouldn't know what to do with a one-piece -- she's never had one -- as the long torso she inherited from her grandma would certainly make it uncomfortable, initiating the heightened self-awareness and pulling of fabric that the 'cons' in the above debate attribute to midriff-baring styles.

No, I think the larger question is not what swimsuits or any revealing clothes might say of the young girls who wear them but what women -- mothers, especially -- are willing to admit about themselves and the cues children take from all the adults in their life.

And the issue is what we -- the adults -- struggle endlessly to hide: the human body's native (gorgeous) form and function, culminating in sexual expression. 

Don't get me wrong: I am not a pageant mom. The makeup and hair products I own fit in a kid's pencil bag (really). I am not a proponent of precocious promiscuity or suggestive clothes styled obviously to gratify the parent, rather than provide for the child's physical or emotional comfort.

On the other hand, I take great pleasure in physical fitness and have found that virtually any article of clothing is more flattering when the flesh it's covering best fits the wearer -- and that holds whether we're talking about women my age with the cheeks to rock a thong bikini or women my grandmother's age, whose capris show off the calves and ankles that can walk mile after mile. 

In my house, we try to embrace nakedness as a natural state. I often shower with my daughter and dress without trying to hide my sensual bits -- mostly to save time, but also to hear her questions about the body and development in their native environs. Because she's an only and spends considerable time interacting directly with me, she's constantly evaluating her body alongside mine, rather than her peers'.

I'm sure this has led to more than one of my daughter's teachers hearing about the form my underwear take in comparison to her modest girls' briefs. But it has also resulted in my daughter commenting openly when she recognizes women in the media or on the street "being sexy." For 7, she's remarkably articulate about what she does or does not like about how they chose to dress, and her opinion usually celebrates the human part of the equation, rather than the fabric or the bling on the surface.

It has also led to my daughter observing the work your triceps have to do to execute a decent push-up -- something she's learning in order to catch up with classmates at the local gymnastics studio.

And it has led to inevitable but focused discussion of the privileges of maturing into an adult female. I can wear heels during the school day. She cannot. Some of my attire or activities require me to wear a bra. Hers do not. My body hair requires more maintenance than hers does. 

In the end, I want my daughter to be comfortable in her skin -- all of it -- not just the parts that are or are not covered by swimwear. Already, I have no doubt she'll have shoes to go with it.

In our house -- a farm house that's home to an only child -- pets give shape to our day from the second our now 7-year-old daughter's feet hit the floor.

Before heading to the bathroom herself, she pads to the door to let out the 13-year-old Vizsla who puts up with "sharing" her tangle of bed covers each night.

Hearing the door crack open, our herd of cats shoots the gap, and I hear my daughter exclaim over their dew-wet feet, or their light pawing of each other as they dive into the cat-food bowl she fills, out of the dogs' reach on a bench inside the door. 

Many of our three dogs and five cats pre-date our daughter's birth and have had to adjust to her constant handling -- the chasing and babying, and her patter, often very close to their faces. Those that came into our lives while she could name them and watch them grow from babyhood are nonsensically pliant and forgiving. These are cats that can be strung up by one paw, when she drops something, say, and reaches down to fumble for it, the cat tipping like a nearly-spilt cup of juice under her other arm. 

For an only child, our farm kid especially, pets are siblings. They're the animated other in her life when mom and dad sit motionless in communion with computer screens. They will chase ping-pong balls around the living room and pounce on fingers that wiggle underneath bedspreads. They will curl up and purr or stretch out and snore within an arm's reach, even with the steady hum of her singing or chastising of Baby, her fallible imaginary playmate. They run ahead of us, climbing trees or splashing into the creek, whenever we leave the house on foot or four-wheeler or bicycle or sled. They are the first thing she hugs when she gets scared of her parents' arguing and the last thing she asks for at night. 

Our pets also introduce our daughter to hard things she doesn't always grasp in the realm of human significance -- like injury and death. A veterinarian once showed me how our four-footed companions can suppress physical pain long past the point at which a human would be howling in misery. At the time she had one of our older dogs sedated for a hysterectomy, and she was preparing to pull one of our dog's teeth while she was unconscious -- it had broken nearly in half, exposing the roots, probably in the chewing of the many bones to be found on a farm.

"Animals usually won't even flinch until they're completely under and you lay your tools right on the nerve that's exposed," the vet said. I had no idea my dog's teeth were so damaged.

This amazing tolerance gives my daughter a close look at injured flesh and bone: a tumor swelling like a blister on the tip of a cat's nose; a pocket of fluid that wells up on a dog's head; stitches that mark the removal of a cancerous teat; a warty protrusion growing through the hide of a cow.

My daughter takes these details to heart, asking at bedtime not for fairy tales but for real-life accounts of how people or animals she knows personally have been hurt, have bled, have healed. I take this as a good sign she's aware of what bodies can endure, possibly cultivating an understanding of that crossing over -- the point at which life cannot be sustained.

Last year, my daughter helped me bury the first of our aging pets -- a raccoon-sized, pitch-black lazybones of a cat named Frank, who got louder and more insistent as his eyesight and hearing failed. Most days, he didn't leave the steps leading up to the house, assured that both the people and the food would show up in close proximity at some point. He was hit and killed when he sprinted in front of a co-worker's truck on our gravel driveway; he had followed me and Eliza when we set out on foot. 

Together, Eliza and I dug a Frank-sized hole in the backyard, near an oak sapling I had been sheltering from the deer that feast on plantings close to the house in winter. When we walked around the quonset shed to pick up Frank's body, I was shocked by how heavy it was and how it stretched to couple feet as I lifted him by the legs, then got my other hand under his head, where it wasn't matted with blood. We had some trouble refolding him to fit even our generous resting place, but eventually, I sat talking to him, stroking his glossy but slightly ill-groomed old-man-cat fur and recounting the 11 years he'd lived with us. 

"What are you doing, Mama?" Eliza asked. 
"Well, I'm just trying to remember how good Frank's life was and that we loved him," I said. 
Then she, too, petted his head, examining the pink of his distended tongue with fascination.

As we pushed in the dirt and mounded it up so the dogs wouldn't dig into the grave, Eliza said something that made me think she didn't quite get the finality of it, that death was irreversible.

But that night by lamplight, she got the story right. Frank joined the Pantheon of hurts and heartbreaks she keeps enshrined in her last waking thoughts.

"He can't come back alive, can he Mama," she decided. "But we put dirt on him so the worms will come and find him, right?" 

I had forgotten I'd said anything about decomposition, but the idea took root. 
She'll often ask what Frank looks like 'now.'
​And we talk about how clean bones can shine.