the mother's daughter

It is an overwhelming thing to be a teenage girl with curly hair.

My curls emerged suddenly when I was thirteen years old, inherited from my mother and my grandmother. It seemed like overnight my head had been deluged in corkscrews of DNA, double-helixes unspooling into snarled frizz. I quickly grew frustrated with my hair and its new disobedience to composure, cracking comb teeth and tangling rubber bands into my roots. What was one supposed to do with hair like this? What had I done to deserve curls like mine?

I began seeking answers in my mother’s bathroom, the nursery for every little girl’s cosmetic frame of reference. Interspersed across her countertop, there were straighteners and curling irons, ribbon women looming through magazines, bottles of follicle potions — a mosaic of genomic remedies.

All of the daughters don’t want to look like their mothers.

All of the mothers don’t want to look like their mothers, either.

***

In eighth grade, my homeroom teacher assembled the girls in my class and passed out laminated pamphlets titled “Puberty: Blossoming into a Woman.” We teased each other anxiously. Were we truly old enough to be approaching the cusp of womanhood? On the inside of the cover, there was an attractive older girl with satin-smooth tresses, a shapely figure, and a bulleted list of the blessings pubescence has granted her: Boobs, Bleeding, and Beauty! I traced my thumb fluently around her woman hips, her woman breasts, and her woman ponytail, picturing the child outline of my own.

“After school,” our teacher said, “I want you all to ask your mothers about their experiences with puberty.”

When I got home that afternoon, my mother showed me a picture of her when she was early into high school. Her curly hair shot up like lightning and her proportions were soft. She didn’t seem like she had blossomed into a woman yet.

***

During my freshman year, I noticed that girls were starting to become pretty.

It bothered me that I didn’t look like most of them. In fact, I looked nothing like any of them at all. As I stuttered and weaved through the pallid hallways, I would find myself breaking queues of Barbie dolls and burnished porcelain daughters. Nylon heads of glossy hair, sculpted vinyl waists, shades of cherry-cheeked beauty painted onto every ridge of bone.

Before girls become women, society must first make them beautiful. After puberty develops the body into its truest form, society processes it into the quintessence of femininity. That was terrifying to me. Even when I was just a bundle of coiled genetics in my mother’s womb, I was inherently due for redesign.

Are all women supposed to be beautiful? What happens to the teenage girls who fail to fit into the mannequin shell? I didn’t know what all of it meant. I felt like I was trying to stuff too much inside of my body — all of the boobs, all of the blood, all of the benchmarks.

***

My mother has pursued beauty for most of her life.

She has rejected her head of kinky curls since she was eighteen. The flat-iron tethered her roots. Her tendrils buckled against hotplates, clenched-fist under heat, lax crooks in steam. Even present day, she smells like an amalgamation of burnt hair and heat protectant.

Her lengths are silky but threadbare. When I comb my fingers through, the ends feel like straw, rigid and slivered. Her pin-strict carapace seems to cage any semblance of my grandmother, but sometimes, I can spot maternal impressions beneath her skin. Fluted collarbones, soupy organs in flight. It somehow feels wrong to find your mother only in the most immutable parts of your body.

All over the world, women and girls will do anything to be beautiful — plastic surgery, keratin treatments, chemical peels. When you constantly strip your mother from your face, your hair, your limbs, her likeness cleaves to your framework, bared like a ghost.

***

Pretty girls aren't allowed to be angry. Anger is a ladening feeling, anchoring generations of girls who want to become women to its aimless practices. When I picture all of the beautiful women in the world, they are not angry. They are void, cupped with mirror-strung desires.

When girls become women, their bones become hollow. Matchstick skeletons wearing the veneers of their mothers and themselves. Always light, skin-deep, gilded to appeal.

The skeletons of the angry girls are heavy, freighted with heritage. If we fracture our bones and scoop out the marrow, we wouldn’t need to dress our cheeks with our ancestral palette. We could always just be pretty, weightless, painted wafer-thin.

***

When I was sixteen, my mother helped me straighten my hair for the first time. It was in the middle of the night. My mother detangled my hair with conditioner and snapped the flat iron twice, as if to wake something her body remembered before she did.

Sitting in front of her bathroom mirror, I watched every curl flatline into slack, glimmering sheets guided through metal by my mother’s fingers. The air was saturated with her musk, moisture hissing dry. I closed my eyes and inhaled every moment, dissolving into ringlets of smoke.

When we were finished, I gazed at my reflection for quite some time, disillusioned. In the mirror, there was this girl with beautiful straight hair, but she felt so sugarcoated, glazed with performance rather than embodiment. I felt so frustrated that I almost reached out to point at her.

She is not a woman.

I realize now that I wasn’t wrong, but merely half-right. She is her mother’s daughter.

***

I sometimes still think about the curls I burned away, the way they used to twist like coils of DNA. I think about my mother and her own curls, hard-pressed and disciplined; the pamphlet girl modeling the prerequisites of feminine design; the Barbie dolls and porcelain daughters. Their fragile bones, their hollowed centers, their contours veiled beneath molds of skin. The foundation of womanhood.

All of the daughters don’t want to look like their mothers.

All of the daughters are slipping into the mannequin shell.