First, a quick illustration.

A good friend of mine, Joy Leach, tells the story of a childhood memory that has shaped her life as a working mom and wife.

Her dad, every week, would pull out seven one-dollar bills and give them to her mom, and this was her allowance for the week. They were not in poverty, though in the '50s wealth levels were nowhere near today's. For Joy, traveling and doing her work as a happily married mom of two adult children, as she contemplates her years of delivering training in corporations across America, this image of one-dollar bills is the big memory. It is the charged symbol that instructed her on how not to be. She decided not to ever be dependent on a husband for the weekly doling out of an allowance. She moved into a career, big time.

Where and how did you learn about your gender-related identity and energy? From a variety of sources surely: your family, your decade, your role models, your own thinking, the media. And you also had a body doing its thing. No matter where and when you were raised, the gender molding process was going on. How much estrogen did you have, how much of an analytical brain, how much access to your feelings was fostered? Nature and nurture were duking it out and blending inside your little being as you were becoming the man or woman you are.

Here is a question to ask yourself, as the fully-bloomed adult woman or man that you have become: do you like how you are now in your gender? This is a subset of the big question-do you like the person you are now, and what do you want to change? Gender is one of the fundamental subset questions.

So take a crack at these:

• What gifts were you given as a boy or girl biologically and psychologically-athletic prowess, freedom to feel, to fight for what you want? What pluses came to you as a boy or girl, or as a teen, connected to your gender?
• What damage was done because of your gender-forced to looked beautiful, to compete when you did not want to, to study boyish or girlish things, to notbe artistic or athletic for whatever reason? What minuses came your way, and have you seen them for what they are?
• Do you have a few stories like Joy and the seven one-dollar bills? What images pulled or pushed you toward being a certain kind of man or kind of woman? And what original combination of gender dynamics make up the unique person you are?

The first thing to do as men and women being responsible for our gender definition is to look at our irrevocable pasts and accept them for what they were. We do this by looking at what attracted us or repulsed us in younger years, and the conclusions we correctly or incorrectly drew.

We mustn't sentimentalize our pasts with how many cute dresses we got to wear when we would have rather been making mud pies, or how many baseball games we played when we would have rather been fishing or reading. And though it may be tempting, we don't get to demonize or victimize either: Your parents and role models tried their best. We have to accept what happened, the good and bad, and it is always, always both. Maybe your influences were more like Modern Family than Ozzie and Harriet.

We create who we are now from where we came from then.

Happy gender review. And enjoy those TV shows while you harvest those memories.