"Mom, were you sexy when you were a kid?"

Uh, what?
My seven-year-old and I are jockeying for the sink in the bathroom, half-clothed in pajamas, post-shower.

"What do you mean, 'sexy?'"
I'm sort of stalling, sort of not. Chances are she does mean something other than the worst-case scenarios running in my head.

I'm not surprised by her question, though. I'm in better shape now than ever, at age 37, thanks to Pilates training and the international community of fellow students I've discovered in its quiet discipline. The central tenet of the original exercise regimen, developed over decades by an actual guy -- holistic fitness fanatic Joseph H. Pilates -- is that you feel intimately how your body moves and work to balance and challenge it. His favorite workout wear (circa 1920) was a pair of short white shorts -- in winter. He was also photographed performing his exercises in a loin cloth in summer. 

By comparison, my full-length yoga pants and tank tops look like space suits. But still, it's more skin than I let my daughter show at school, usually in observance of the 'noodle strap' rule (no tank tops or shirts with spaghetti straps).

"I mean, did you wear sexy clothes?"

Oh, boy. Here we go. 

"What is 'sexy'?" I parry.

My goal is not to dictate what my daughter does or does not show of her own body, within reason. She's very tall -- her head nearly brushes my shoulder. She has long legs, even by elementary standards. People are going to look at her most of her life, if she continues to grow at this rate.

But I hope she's riveting even if she's not the tallest woman to enter a room.

There is a certain life force -- a purpose, a passion, an ease -- that moves the most striking bodies out there. And I'm not talking just about athletes or celebrities who are good in front of cameras. It's command of one's self that only comes of practice, self-confidence, and strength -- inside and out.

You pursue it on your own, challenged entirely by your own resistance. As in Pilates practice, you cannot better yourself simply by contrasting your abilities with those less able. It's all within you. 

Or it isn't.

Anyway, I hope that's what my daughter means.

I let a few beats pass, knowing she will kill the silence in short order.

"So, how old were you when your parents got you a phone?" she says, showing her hand.

I'll take it. You just worry about having the maturity to manage a cell phone, just a while longer.

Kids -- especially only kids, I think -- are naturally subject to their parents' constant assessment:
What is s/he good at?
What does she need to learn about life that she's not getting, in the absence of siblings?
How is she 'different' because she's an only?

I've realized recently -- and I want the record to show it -- that my daughter has the unique confidence to question anyone. I'm not claiming she will talk to anyone, because that's not true. If she's intimidated by a situation, she'll go all shy on me and refuse to speak at all. But if a question crystalizes in her mind, you can bet she'll ask it, regardless of social context. She's just honestly interested in the answer. 

I think this trait comes of her 'only'-ness. As duly noted by many adult singletons, only children are perfectly at home conversing with adults in adult language, and mine, anyway, experiences fewer than average situations in which she's talked 'down' to as a child.

Some of my friends -- parents of multiples -- find this annoying -- that kids like mine tend to linger in adult spaces, rather than gravitating toward whatever the kids in the house are doing. But as a professional writer and interviewer, I am jealous of her fearlessness when it comes to just naming what she wants to know. It's a skill I wish I had learned by instinct when I was her age.

Example:
A few months ago, we pulled up to a traffic light in our small town, and waiting in the bike lane alongside Eliza's side of the car was a middle-aged man whose left arm ended at the elbow. He was already at a full standstill, so his disability was practically inconspicuous. He just stood upright, straddling his bike, waiting. 

First, Eliza turned to me and asked how the man could ride without two arms to grip the handlebars. "I don't know -- maybe you'll get to see how he does it when the light turns," I said.

But that wasn't good enough. Next thing I knew: 'Bszzzzzzzzzzh," she was opening her car window.

"What happened to your arm?" she asked, point-blank.

Startled, the rider, lowered his sunglasses so she could meet his gaze and said simply,
"I was born this way. I don't have a hand on this arm." 

"So, how do you get started?" Eliza continued, unfazed. "On your bike? I broke my leg and had two casts. The first one up to here," she said, pointing at her thigh in the car, which the man couldn't see, "and then I had a short cast down to here," she said, patting her knee.

The rider smiled and asked how she broke her leg (ice skating), then began balancing one foot on a pedal as the light turned.

"I'll show you how I do it," the man said, grinning. He winked at her, put up his shades and slowly, carefully, pedaled to full stride. 

As we passed him on the street, Eliza stuck her hand out and waved. Then she turned to me and recapped the whole thing, as though I hadn't heard. 

"But, how does his ring his bell, Mama?" she asked as soon as she finished. "Do you think he can do no hands?"

"I don't know, honeybee," I said. "You might have to ask him."

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.