I was ten years old the first time my mother dragged three blades across my skin. My birthday party was in an hour, and I wanted to wear my new skirt. I was ten years old the first time I realized my mother didn’t find me perfect, the first time that concept entered my vernacular as anything that I had to physically chisel myself into, anything that required my mother to drag three blades across my ten-year-old arms and legs. I am seventeen years old now. I am living in a forest of our perfectionist vernacular, a forest with roots hundreds of years old. Razors, in the form of three blades, are little more than one century old. One hundred twenty years ago, a man took a facial razor for men and made it safer. When they made him rich (but not rich enough), he convinced women that they needed it to be loved by their husbands, loved by their friends. He convinced them that being hairless was natural, was expected, was safe, safe, safe. Drag three blades across our skin; be safe. My great grandmother would have been living in Egypt at the time America dug a new cave for His women, a new cave with shadows of their bodies projected in front of them, a new cave shut away from their mothers with skin created to protect them from the cold, from the Sun, from the dirt. Skin with hair meant to keep them safe, skin with hair that grew the way our trees did long, long, ago, long before our new forest of perfectionist vernacular. This is the Great Marketing Scheme of our America: make them believe that they are safe. Rob them of their money when they realize they are not. Here is the cave that I live in, located deep within the forest of perfectionist vernacular: My body is only worthy if the fabric drapes just right, if every step is light and graceful. My body is only worthy if my organs hide beneath my belly, deep enough to create straight lines where my curves should be. My body is only worthy if my skin melts away like butter, if my hair unwinds itself like yarn. I have spent a year mapping my way out, finding the way back to my great grandmother living in post-colonial Egypt and holding my grandmother wrapped in her hand-knit blanket, the seeds that will sprout my mother and then me buried deep within her. I have spent a year unlearning the lies my America has taught me since birth, the lies its influence has crossed oceans to whisper into the ears of our mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers. I am learning the path to take my great grandmother’s soul by the hand, to show her that her skin is not butter to melt away, that her hair is not yarn to be unwound and knit into the straight hair of a perfect light-skinned woman. I am learning the path I must take to hold my daughter in my arms, to tell her that she is too big, too big for their caves, too big for their forests, too big to be contained by razor blades and dieting books, too big to be suffocated by their perfectionist vernacular and marketing schemes. I will tell her the story of how her hips, her mother’s hips, her grandmother’s hips, her great grandmother’s hips once carried the weight of the Great Pyramids, the Great Sphinx, the Greatest Empire of the Ancient World. I will tell her that her hips carry Greatness.