My mother had a fat pussy. Not plump-fat but bland-fat, like a mound of bread dough. It was broad, sparsely furred, surrounded by girth. I didn’t see it often – not even she did that – but I can almost sketch the view from four years old: that pad of pale flesh that appeared briefly above me between her stand from the toilet and the hoist of her big white underpants. It didn’t look at all like mine, and I don’t think she liked it. I never saw her touch it, but more than once she warned me not to touch my own. She even advised me not to take so long peeing.

She had weak fingernails and ugly feet, and legs that widened from thick ankles to dimpled knees to pocky thighs. Like inverted piano stools, she used to say.

Ugly this. Fat that. Yet the world found my mother pretty, and she knew it. She was the beauty in her family of origin, the flirt in high school, the mistress of my father’s romantic heart. Whenever a camera was aimed at her she pulled her glasses off and held them behind her back, in her left hand. She positioned her legs so that her feet made a T, front foot pointed forward and back foot almost perpendicular to it. She tried to teach me to pose that way, too.

She was always energetic and helpful. Even now she finds it impossible to repress her suggestions. Why, I probably wasn’t older than seven when she started teaching me how to hide my flaws. I don’t remember having any then, but Mom was a big believer in genes over environment; her cautions were about familiar problems I was likely to develop. I learned how to minimize the width of my nose before it was even apparent that I had inherited my father’s. I understood that a T-strap would slim the look of my foot before my feet grew. I was taught how to pick clothes that wouldn’t “cut me in half” long before I ever widened.

I’m not sure I would have known I had flaws if she hadn’t told me. Her incessant suggestions weren’t good for my self-confidence, but fortunately I had a few charms against her. It turned out I had qualities aside from my body, that I could esteem. And because my mother was the baby of her original family, and I was the first of mine, I swapped some roles with her. In many circumstances I parented her, and disregarded her foolishness.

Like when she told me not to climb fences. I must have been ten, and we lived in Southern California, south of San Diego, half a block from what would be my high school. The subdivision was wild and free, grass and dichondra conquering tumbleweed and prickly pear, a new school amid a new housing tract, just cut into the adobe-hard terrain. When the rare rains came, the street gutters coursed with tan water from the corrugations of the school grounds. When the Santana winds blew from the east, half of the school’s outdoor lockers sifted sand into their ventilation slats.

There were chain link fences everywhere. Short ones around the parking areas, six-footers at the school perimeter, and two-story woven walls for the tennis courts. We were drawn to those walls. Even though they would take us nowhere, the tall chain link fences just begged to be scaled.

Mom really didn’t want me to do that. It was okay with her if I climbed trees, and I don’t remember her objecting to normal-sized fences, but she drew the line at the double fences around the tennis courts. When pressed, she got flustered and blurted that I could injure myself at the top; tall fences and horseback riding carried some risk that I would not be an acceptable bride.

I’d seen the film at school. I knew the rudiments of reproductive anatomy. What she said made no sense. I could just as easily injure myself, that way, on a low chain link fence. Or the right kind of tree branch. And I’d already decided I didn’t want to be a virgin on my wedding night.

Of course I climbed the fence. There was a little thrill and danger in its height. All of us neighbor kids met that challenge.