When I was twelve, my body became the enemy in my own home. Estella, my mother, looked at me and saw danger. Tank tops, fitted shirts, shorts above the knee, even painted nails were forbidden. If I wore anything that shaped to my body, she would look me in the eye and call me a whore. She would spit out the word slut at me when I was barely old enough to understand what it meant.

I was a child, but to her I was already guilty.

It confused me because Estella herself made no attempt at beauty. She wore baggy men’s shirts and sweatpants every day, her hair pulled into the same ponytail. She told me it was for comfort, as if womanhood itself was uncomfortable. But then I found old photographs of her as a teenager. She was dressed in the fashions of her time, in clothes she would later condemn. She looked like a girl who wanted to be seen. She looked alive. The very thing she once was, she tried to strangle out of me.

She made it her mission to stop me from becoming a woman. She never said those words outright, but I felt it. Every restriction, every insult, every slammed door was an attempt to crush my femininity before it could bloom.

And yet there was a contradiction. Estella policed my appearance with an iron grip, but she never forbade me from being around kids other parents would not allow their daughters near. I had friends who showed up high to classes, who snuck alcohol into lessons, who smoked and bragged about it afterward. Their parents might not have trusted them, but their parents trusted me. I was the “good Catholic child.” I was safe, holy, reliable. And I did not resist the label.

When I told Estella what my friends were doing, she never lost her temper. She only sighed and told me not to do it myself. It was strange to me. She controlled how I dressed, what I wore, what I showed, but she did not stop me from walking side by side with kids other parents feared. Looking back, I think it was because she recognized them. I think some part of her understood them more than she understood me.

I never joined them. I never drank. I never smoked. I never wanted to. Sometimes I wonder if it was fear that kept me from trying, fear of what my parents would do if I did. Other times I wonder if I simply didn’t need it, because I already knew what danger felt like without touching it myself.

My escape was different. I disappeared into books. I started reading when I was eight or nine, and by my teenage years I was finishing one a day. Fiction became my survival. I wrote reviews on Goodreads and sometimes publishers even sent me books for free. I slipped into the lives of characters instead of living my own. Where my friends acted outward, I acted inward. Where they sought escape through substances, I sought escape through story.

Estella’s control over me was born from her own history, a history she never told me herself. Almost everything I know about her past has come in pieces, dropped by extended family members, overheard in conversations, or shared years later when the truth could no longer be completely hidden. The story of her life was not handed to me. I had to dig for it.

She has two sisters and an older brother, and they all grew up in neglect. Their mother drank heavily and ignored them. They went to school without food, with poor hygiene, wearing the same clothes for days even though their father was a successful dentist who made good money. There was no excuse except that neglect had become normal in their household. My grandmother liked to cover her tracks, to deny anything that was true and wrong, to pretend that what hurt them never happened.

By the time Estella was a teenager, the family’s secrets were already thick. When she was seventeen, she picked up the house phone and answered a call that would reveal one of the deepest. On the line was a man who introduced himself as Nathan, her brother. The gist of the call was devastating. He wanted to speak to his father. He wanted Estella to know he did not hate her. And he wanted them both to know that he was dying of AIDS, but that he forgave their father and still loved him.

Nathan was the child my grandfather had with another woman before marrying my grandmother. When Nathan was five, my grandfather was sent to Vietnam to serve as a dentist. My grandmother told him she despised the boy, that he was too much to handle, and she sent Nathan away to live with my grandfather’s parents. She raised her own children as if Nathan had never existed.

Estella found out about him in that single phone call. He died shortly after. The family barely spoke his name again. His story, like so many others, was buried under silence.

Estella told me about Nathan once, years later, in a rare moment of softness. I could tell it had marked her. I think she carried guilt, sadness, and confusion. But even in that moment, she did not tell me much. The pieces I have now were scattered across time, given to me in fragments by people who were willing to break the family’s silence. That silence was its own cruelty, one that made me grow up with half-truths and shadows instead of clarity.

I see now how all of this lived in her. Her neglectful parents. The brother who called only to say goodbye. The secrets and silences that shaped her. I see how it all twisted her into a woman who tried to keep me small, who believed womanhood itself was a danger, who thought if she crushed mine, I might be safe.

But the irony is that in trying to erase my womanhood, she passed her shame to me anyway.

I grew up inside her cage of silence. And even now, as I write this, I am only beginning to name the shadows she left me with.