I never identified myself using labels.

That isn’t to say that I can’t be labeled. I am many things: wife, daughter, sister, friend, mother, partner, writer, worker, sister … the list is long. Many of the labels I’ve worn include “not”—not popular, not outgoing.

But when it comes to -isms, I just don’t think about them. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some kind of self-serving sermon about how I am above being labeled or how I’m just so cool and so out there that labels don’t apply to me. In fact, I am a very mainstream person. I like cable TV and J. Crew and the potato is my all-time favorite food.

No, it isn’t that.

Take feminism, for instance. Could you define me as a feminist? In the classical sense, no. But in the way I live my life, making choices that are best for me in terms of work and family, then yes, you could call me a feminist. When it came time for me to choose a profession, I made the decision based not on my gender, but on my passion.

I wanted to be a reporter. It never occurred to me to think about myself as a “female reporter.” Then I wanted to stay home with my daughter. So could you call me a SAHM? Yeah, you could, and sometimes I call myself that, too, because it is the easiest, most literal way to describe my life to outsiders.

I am a mom. I stayed home with my kids.

Now, I spend many hours of my week writing for money. So that makes me a WAHM, right? And that makes YOU a WOHM, right? And what if you work part-time? Are you a PTSAHM or a PTWOHM?

All this alphabet soup only serves to mire us in the very thing we say we seek so hard to avoid. We say we want to love and support one another. But we find new and interesting ways to point the finger at each other and pin these labels on our backs so that we can point with the power of a crowd behind us.

At what point do we let the crowd become a community?

At what point do we stop fighting among ourselves and act like the loving, caring woman—yes, women—that we are inside our hearts? When do we realize that words are powerful, and labels are among the strongest weapons in our arsenal, for good and for bad?

Words like retard and stupid and hate and ugly and fat are as hurtful as bullets. They wound, and the scars are tender for a lifetime.

Words like SAHM and WAHM and WOHM and hipster parent and helicopter parent and bad mother … these are all words that are at once meaningless and more profound than we can ever fathom. We use these words, sometimes thoughtfully, to provoke debate, and sometimes emotionally, because we are tired and frustrated and we just know the grass is greener over there, for that person wearing the label we covet.

***

She was a woman in a male-dominated corporate culture, the kind of woman who takes her earring off to talk on the phone. She had her colors done and charged it to the company as a “development opportunity.” She wore scarves in creative ways and had the kind of haircut you see on a certain kind of marketing executive who came of age during the second round of the feminist revolution.

This is the woman for whom the battle was fought. The marching and the protesting, and all the tears and sweat and blood of those early revolutionaries in fact created this woman.

She would do anything to get ahead. She would shake your hand while stabbing you in the back. Her every move was calculated to build the next rung on her ladder to the top. She called herself a “champion for women” and one day, she told me that I would move up a lot faster if I would only wear more make-up.

And a skirt wouldn’t hurt my chances, either.

***

My daughter was sick last weekend, and I prefer to tend to the wee ones when they are unwell. I have so many memories of my mother’s cool hand on my hot forehead. I cherish those memories; they make me feel safe and cared for even now, when the dark middle of the night wraps its hands around my neck and I struggle with all the worries in my heart.

So I bundled her up, my little girl, and held her head while she vomited in a towel. I pushed her hair out of her eyes and fetched her cold water. Drink it in tiny sips, I told her. Mama’s right here with you, I told her.

She lay next to me, and she reached out with her hand. I took her small palm in my own and squeezed gently. “Mama,” she whispered. “You are the bestest mama of all the mamas. Bester than anyone else’s mama.”

And just like that, my girl, she labeled me. It is a badge I wear with pride, the only label that need apply. It is a label 38 years in the making, one delivered with the purity of soul that can only be achieved when your heart is new.

These are the labels that matter.