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I’m an anti-feminist,” she declared, looking around at her classmates for approval.

I must have heard wrong. Of course, I had heard of such mythical beasts, but I assumed they were all seventy-two-year-old white male senators. Fourteen-year-old, over-achieving girls, in my experience, were all competing to prove that they were more feminist than their peers.

“Do you know what that means?” I asked, aghast. Clearly, my astonishment was just what this student had been shooting for from the new, young teacher introducing herself on the first day of school. Smugly, she answered, “It means I don’t buy all of that feminist crap.”

“Really? You don’t think you are as good as the boys? You don’t think you are as smart? I thought you were a field hockey player. Is your sport as important as theirs?” Okay, a little advice for new teachers out there: Pretty much everything a student says to you on the first day of school is designed to elicit a reaction. Whatever you do, do not react.

For the next few months, that girl would mutter “anti-feminist” under her breath at random, coyly peeking up to see if she could get her crazy, twenty-something feminist teacher to lose her cool. I tried my best to ignore her, but I couldn’t help wondering what in the world her mother had taught her. How, exactly, does one raise an anti-feminist in the aftermath of Title IX? Was this some sort of south-of-the-Mason-Dixon thing? And what was my responsibility as a teacher? Was I mandated to report this to some authority?

Then the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, and the students were too busy cracking cigar jokes to bother needling their teacher.

What I did not realize was that while I had been kicking around my college English department, “liberal” and “feminist” had become dirty words. I was proud to be a feminist. I had taken enough Women’s Studies courses to know the history of our movement, and I was eager to be associated with second-wave feminism’s focus on equality. I was down with third-wave feminism, too, as I tried to impress upon my high school students that they could be strong women and still wear pink.

I assumed I could plan the trajectory of my feminism. When we decided to get married, my fiance' and I agreed that we would never put his career first, even though it was likely he would make a smidgen more money with his MBA than I would when I finished my PhD in literature. I would move for him while I was dissertating, but then he would move for my career when I got my first tenure-track job, most likely in a suburb of the Middle of Nowhere. Our careers were equal.

I had my first child six months before I defended that dissertation. It had become clear that my husband could not work too far from a major city and that I was unlikely to get a job near someplace he could work. We thought about living apart, perhaps coming together on the weekends, but we weren’t thrilled about raising our kids with occupationally separated parents.

By this time, I had serious doubts about academia, and I was only too glad of an excuse to search for a new career path. However, in one of those One-Thing-Leads-To-Another kinds of ways, it is now four years later, I have three children under the age of five, an unpublished book and no career to speak of. My husband, on the other hand, is surging forward with his career, ticking off all the little boxes years before he is expected to.

I am not all Girl Power anymore because I am too busy wiping up poop. My four-year-old informed me the other day that “Most of the time, the Mommy doesn’t go to work,” a misconception I quickly remedied. Shit, I drive a minivan. And I like it.

What right do I have to use the F-word? That word belongs to the women in the field, the women fighting the good fight, arguing in front of the Supreme Court or saving orphans in third-world countries or at least bringing home a paycheck. I am just a housewife. A housewife with a laptop, but a housewife nonetheless.

I am embarrassed to tell people I am a feminist, and yet I cannot imagine letting go of that identity.Because, in every part of my sleep-deprived, slightly lumpy body, I know that I want to be a feminist. I have heard that the fourth wave of feminism is women of my age out being activists, and I surely want to be a part of that progressiveness. I want to take the movement forward, but I need to be home by 3pm, because that’s the baby’s afternoon feeding and she really has no interest in a bottle. Maybe she’s the one who isn’t a feminist.

Or maybe I’m letting other people define my feminism for me.

So, I am proposing my own version of fourth wave feminism for the women out there who didn’t even make it to the rally about school budget cuts because it interfered with the younger children’s naptimes: My fourth wave feminists offer to organize the school gift so that the other room mother has time to attend to her dental practice. We carpool to save the planet but also so that we all have a little extra time to submit articles or practice law. Some of us fight for equal pay, and some of us cheer on the feminists fighting for equal pay. We do not, for the record, complain about other women breastfeeding in public, nor do we criticize our friends for their childbearing choices. We are women with children, without children, and men, too, and we may just throw our hats in the air every so often and proclaim that we are doing it our way. My fourth wave feminists are an eclectic bunch, and we are raising our kids to be feminists and activists, even if we have only been to one demonstration in five years and it took Proposition 8 to get us there.

This is not the type of woman I set out to be, and I doubt it is the final iteration of my feminism. But, I will not give up the label. I will keep calling myself a feminist and keep working in small ways to fill the large word I apply to myself. I will hold all my children, boys and girl, to the same standards regarding nail polish (when you are 13), words across their asses (when you are paying your own rent), and Tinkerbell costumes (fine, but not to school). I will read them all Pinkalicious and let them all play with Hot Wheels (but it would be nice if the baby would stop trying to eat the little tires). I will read Ms. and blog about feminist issues (and poop). All three of my children will grow up to be proud of the word “feminist.”

And maybe it is that effort, that constant striving towards ideals, that continues to define me as a feminist.

Emily Rosenbaum is a freelance writer raising three feminists in Los Angeles.