More than anything, my mother wanted me to be the Breck girl. Blonde, diaphanous, non-threatening, and docile; the epitome of feminine beauty.

But I was dark, and so when I showed my first pimple, she rushed me to a dermatologist. He dismissed her concern about scarring; after all a pimple is a pimple is a pimple. But my mother remained unsettled, and the next morning, I found myself in a cosmetologist’s office. An hour later, I left with a pretty pink and white bag filled with different facial care products—scrubs, astringents, cleansers, and rubs and soothers and lotions and powders all to be used in sequential order, twice a day.

At 12, my mother gave me my very own calorie counter so that I could tot up the number of calories I had consumed each day. To this day, I can still tell you the number of calories in a medium sized apple (95) and in a medium sized hard-cooked egg (78). And I’d be lying if I didn’t say that this knowledge sometimes guides my choice of apples and eggs at the grocery store today.

Once I started menstruating, every day, she sent me to school with a sandwich made of chopped iceberg lettuce tucked between two slices of Pepperidge Farm “Very Thin” white bread. After school, if I was still hungry, she allowed me to eat as much iceberg as I wished. She bought me armpit shields; after all, the last thing the Breck girl wanted was to spoil her diaphanous glow with a stinky stain under her pits.

Before my first gynecological visit, my mother took me into her bathroom and I told me to make myself “smell nice.” She pointed to four phallic looking cylinders, standing like little pastel sentries, on her vanity countertop. I stared at the labels: “rose,” “lilac,” “lavender,” “orange.”

I looked at the shut door behind me. While my mother was strict about her beauty demands, she was always a little short on instructions. The first time I tried to spray myself—I chose orange because I liked creamsicles—I missed entirely and covered most of her freshly painted sea foam green wall with a white tacky dust. The second time I had better success. I thoroughly covered the front of my lower abdominal area until it looked like my pubic area, just barely showing dark down, was shrouded with the same hoarfrost I’d seen just that morning, cloaking the spring branches of the apple tree outside my bedroom window.

People have told me that my mother’s beauty regimen was over the top, perhaps even a little neurotic. And perhaps it was. But although she didn’t have words for it, Mom knew that the prevailing beauty standard for women was and remains heteronormative. Was her concern about my body and weight, my facial features, and skin tone, my hair, crazy? Or was she simply trying to secure my passport into the brutal and oppressive panoptic, patriarchal world that still pressures girls to conform to a masculinist beauty ideal starting from a very young age?

I would love to know your thoughts. And if you have stories like this, please share them. I would love to hear them!