Epiphanies don’t often come with hoop earrings but mine recently did. I’m somewhat embarrassingly admitting that lobe-dangling geometric inspiration came from a recent rewatching of the original “Sex in the City” movie. You remember the one where Carrie goes a little bridezilla and wonders why Big couldn’t hang.

My hoop inspired a-ha moment wasn’t about jewelry, fashion or sex. It was about embracing and owning my inner girl — it was about taking pride in my Xs.

As I think back on my life, so much of it was about denying the inner girl. At five, I refused to wear a tutu because it was too pink and girly. At seven, I cried my eyes out because I got a Barbie doll instead of her tricked-out motor home. At 10, I refused to take home economics, telling my mom that those skills serve to repress women and that I’d hire someone to cook, clean or sew if need be.  At 11, my mother threatened to send me to finishing school to purge my Tom-boyish jock side. And at 12, I distinctly remember noticing that boobs bounced while in a go-cart and feeling betrayed by the additional drag on my aerodynamics.

My mother recently retired from a job (she always distinguished it from a career) making toilet paper and paper towels in my hometown of Everett, Washington. The paper mill wasn’t a place, as you might imagine, for fashion or femininity. Day after day, night shift after night shift, I watched my mother uniform-up in old jeans, worn t-shirts, steel-toed shoes and eyewear as far from Prada as safety glasses can get. For me, this was what women wore to work. It was normal.

My mother’s work schedule meant that a couple weeks during the month my father, who started his career as a mechanic and then worked his way up to run a heavy-equipment dealership, was the one in charge. He dressed my brother and me; he nurtured us, fed us (often cans of chili) and read our bedtime stories.

So, instead of “Leave it to Beaver”,  I think my role models were a bit gender-bending. While she was always there for the sporting event or to bake the class cupcakes, my mother wasn’t the warmer parent, my father was. As the oldest boy of seven kids he’d helped raise his brothers in sisters in a difficult financial and home situation. He had more nurture training than my mom, though she was loving in her own way.

As a mechanic, my dad’s passion was cars. My childhood with him was “dogs, snails and puppy dog tails” and car shows. I remember in my early teens the disappointing realization that belts and rings weren’t just items that made trucks run.

My mother instinctively knew that while much of the untraditional parenting was good for me, my feminine development was important too. She opted for an intense intervention through bribery, offering to pay $100 (in the early eighties, a serious stash of cash) to dress me every day for a month and join her at a Color Me Beautiful session. I resisted at first but was too pragmatic to not go for the green-backs. After pegging me a “Winter” my mother decked me out and monitored my make-up day after day. I hated it and was excited when we could retire the mascara, but admit that it did impact me. I did start wearing more feminine clothes but that didn’t mean I embraced my inner girl.

Thinking back, I entered college and the workforce continuing to deny much of my femininity because I perceived it as a disadvantage. I’d heard how being a woman was essentially a success stranglehold; how low our representation was (and still is) in politics, business, philanthropy, literature, music, sports, etc. Why would any girl born before the “Girl Power” era want to identify with the “losers?” Why would I embrace my inner girl when I’d felt sexism firsthand?  And, I was afraid that being too feminine would clash with my feminism.

Don’t get me wrong, of course I’ve spent the last 36 years as a woman, but I didn’t really own it, I just played the part like nice window dressing.

This recent girly-revelation shocked even me especially because I’ve spent the last twenty years spending significant amount of time, energy and passion on empowering women and girls through consulting with women’s organizations, co-authoring a book about how to engage women in social change, and doing public speaking on women’s empowerment.

My work in the space hasn’t been about own my inner woman. It was and is simply about promoting good social strategy, justice and fairness. About what is right and effective.

But something has happened in the last year or so that has led me to reengage with my Xs. I’ve been waking up everyday in love with fashion as a sense of my feminine self-expression. I’ve been wearing hot bras and panties that nobody but me can see.  I’ve found myself giddy in lavender bath followed by the floral PJs. I’ve been donning ruffled aprons and cooking four-course meals with pride. I’ve wall-papered. I’ve loved ironing mine and my husband’s shirts. I’ve been wearing impractical heels in the snow. I’ve been absorbing the sensuality of my perfumes– about twelve different kinds. And I’ve been feeling the super power of feminine motherhood.

Why now? It’s hard to know. It wasn’t to snag a dude,  I’ve been with my husband for more than a decade. Was it 37-year old hormones? Did the full force of the testosterone in my house break me? (I have a hockey-playing husband and two manly-man munchkins ages 3 and a half, and 2.) Did Sarah Palin’s hotness get under my skin? Was it that grandmotherhood for my mother and motherhood for me has finally allowed us to fully bond? Was it out of fear of being that frumpy mom the playground who has “let herself go”? Was it cosmically timed pillowed refuge from the “buzzing busyness” of my working-mom uber-career life?

I don’t know why and I don’t care because I’m loving it and I’m sticking with it. I’m experimenting with it. I’m dancing with it. I’m laughing at it and I’m parading it.

I feel fresh and as if the corner pieces of my internal puzzles are finally in place.

Each woman will have her own meaning and definition of her inner girl. For some it may mean embracing beauty, for others it may be finding their voice, or starting a business and for others something entirely different. If you’ve already found her then here’s to living her out-loud. I’d love to hear from you about how you hook up with your chromosomal duo.