“Tell them,” she said eagerly.

I was 6 years old as I sat at my grandparents’ round wooden table for dessert and tea with my aunts and uncles. While the other kids played together before bed, it was my most cherished part of the night.

“I am going to be one of the first female presidents!” I proclaimed.

I was in on my mother’s game. She was a homemaker born in the ’50s, and she spent my childhood convincing me that I could do everything that she was never told she could. I believed every word.

“And what are you?” asked my mother. “A Republican!” I smiled. Six-year-old me, who had just met a calf at the local agricultural fair and now refused to eat meat, didn’t yet realize how her bleeding heart would fit into the world.

My mother smiled. Everyone smiled.

Bleeding heart aside, these dreams weren’t unlike those of other ambitious young women of my age. Strive for what was unthinkable but shouldn’t be.

And why shouldn’t a woman become president? Being born in the ’80s and ’90s, we were meant to be shielded from the harrowing journey of those before us. Just 15 years prior, we couldn’t apply for a mortgage. But that was ancient history, and we were the lucky ones. If our parents were to just treat us equally, we would be equal, case closed.

What had yet to be unveiled was the unspoken truth.

Time marched on, but the subtext remained. People would begin to minimize direct statements that maybe a woman wasn’t the best fit for this or that, but that prevailing stance would linger for the next 30 years.

What 6-year-old me didn’t know was that as much as every person at that table wanted my objective to be easily reached, it wasn’t. Today, it still isn’t.

When people tell little girls they can do anything, I don’t think they’re intentionally lying to them. I think most people genuinely believe it. But what’s missing from the “girlhood warning label” is that you can indeed be anything you want to be, as long as … as long as ….

Wait, what? Nobody told me about the “as long as” part. As long as you aren’t too nice, too direct, too pretty, too ugly, too liberal, too conservative, as long as … people feel like it on a given day.

Plenty of women have paved the way in their respective fields. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Oprah Winfrey, Sara Blakely, Michelle Obama, Serena Williams, Taylor Swift, the list goes on. All of us snail-crawling our way toward equal pay.

But we are still celebrating the woman of it all, instead of the person of it all.

The thing is, women should be celebrated. We have overcome so much. But did we ever really overcome our gender bias? Or did we skip too far ahead? They tell us to “just stick to the policies, and most certainly do not vote on the basis of sex.”

Polarizing thoughts flood my mind. Are we not good enough? Should we stop trying to convince them? Are they worried she’ll cry in the Oval Office? My mind can’t stop relitigating.

Then my conditioning comes back to me. My mother told me I could do anything, be anything. It wasn’t just a party trick; she believed it, I believed it. She is the reason those intrusive thoughts will soon be silenced for me, the subtext muffled. She and everybody who convinces kids to believe the unimaginable.

But nobody wants to hear the ugly truth, which is that much of our country still isn’t quite sure if a woman is fit for the job. It’s mostly unspoken, but it’s there. It’s easy to say it’s not that complicated, but that would be a lie.

Impressing upon women they can be anything they want while simultaneously devaluing their rights is … confusing. Maybe it’s that they believe in our future, but that doesn’t mean they believe in theirs? You can tell me over and over again it’s not about the woman of it all. Six-year-old me wants to believe you. Thirty-six-year-old me knows better.

Twice, now, my mother has chosen the male presidential candidate over the female. The irony is not lost on me. And so here we are, still waiting. Closer. But 30 years later, 248 years later … we are still waiting.

But we’ll tell our daughters that it’s coming soon. We’ll absorb the disappointment until they don’t have to. And our daughters’ daughters can say to their aunts and uncles over tea and dessert that they would like to be president, one day, like those who came before them.

And then maybe, just maybe, they won’t even think about the woman of it all.