The Inheritance No One Chose

It started with Aunt Iris’ thighs.

Iris lived down the road from my mom when she was growing up—close enough that she visited my mother’s house often. Iris was my Grandma Betty’s younger sister. My great aunt.

First Betty. Then her brothers Jack and Eugene. Then Iris, the baby sister.

Aunt Iris always held a particular place in my heart, being a little sister myself. She was also the younger sibling to my very favorite person. My number one fan. Plus, Iris had the magical ability to write perfect cursive backwards, so that her coveted handwritten letters had to be read by holding them up to a mirror.

But to my mother, in her preteen years, Aunt Iris represented an omen.

She had a body my mother would later describe as the same shape as mine, only bigger. And Iris relayed this so often that my mother heard it as a forecast. We have the same body. She said it at the beach. She said it in the kitchen. And she said it while a thirteen-year-old girl in 1952 was looking for something in her own reflection that was not yet Iris, and could still be prevented from becoming Iris.

Besides Aunt Iris’ talent for backwards script, I also recall that she had a complicated marriage, whether that was real or made-up. I was far too young to understand what that meant, where I’d learned it, or what was actually happening to anchor such a memory. But I do wonder if my mother absorbed both facts together—the measurements and the matrimony—as though one explained the other. As though Iris’s thighs were the reason for Iris’s life. As though her own proportions, if she did not intervene, would deliver her to the same address as her Aunt Iris.

Iris was a woman in her late twenties in New Jersey in 1952, holding a figure the culture had told her was a problem long before my mother arrived in her life. By the time the phrase we have the same body left her mouth, the words had been in the room for centuries. Iris was just the most visible link in a longer chain. My mother was the next link. The chain did not begin or end with either of them, but it ran through the girth of their thighs and the curve of their hips.

My mother grew up in a household that had been spared the worst of the century while remaining shaped by it. Her parents had arrived in America as young children in the years before the First World War, part of an immigrant generation that arrived just before the doors began closing. They had grown up in row houses before landing on their feet in a New Jersey suburb. They were educated. They each had a profession. They were Jewish in a moment when Jewishness in New Jersey meant something specific—neither fully secure nor visibly precarious, in a country that had not yet fully decided what to do with the children of the immigrants who had arrived in the previous generation. They had been young adults during the Depression, in their thirties during the war, watching it from a distance that allowed them to keep their household intact while never letting them forget that other households like theirs had not been kept intact at all. They held a particular kind of postwar American optimism, available to a particular kind of postwar American family.

My mother did not inherit her body (or the associated shame) from my Grandma Betty. This is the part of the lineage that surprised me when I finally asked. Besides having a different silhouette, Betty regularly told my mother she was pretty. Betty came in at midnight when my mother was studying past her own exhaustion, in her never-ending quest for perfection, and said go to sleep, get a B, we don’t care. Betty bought her daughter a subscription to Prevention Magazine for her thirteenth birthday because she cared about natural health and not about a prescribed notion of good looks. Betty was a woman who explained menstruation and conception directly to her daughter, and even to her daughter’s friends, because those friends’ own mothers would not. Betty was a celebrated sixth grade math teacher until the day she retired. She was not a mother who made her daughter, my own mother, feel self-conscious—about her body, her brain, or her quest to always be the best.

My sister and I inherited most of Grandma Betty’s old school books. They sat on a shelf in the basement of my childhood home, next to the Encyclopedia Britannica. I would get lost in research and exploration for hours—the hard cloth-covered textbooks with their embossed black type a delight for my tiny fingertips.

Betty was ordinary in her body and unbothered by it. The transmission my mother received did not run through her own mother. It ran sideways, through the aunt down the road who said the same sentence over and over until the sentence became fate—not about marriage, but about thighs.

Lineage does not always pass from mother to daughter. Sometimes it travels through the aunt, the cousin, the family friend who comes to dinner—the woman in the family whose body is displayed, by everyone or no one in particular, as the cautionary version or the most desirable one. The transmission can arrive through a remark repeated across years by someone who was herself relaying what she had received. The kitchen is not the only room where it happens. Sometimes the kitchen is the room where it purposefully did not happen. But the inheritance comes in through the porch door, or the school cafeteria, or the shop window, or the mailbox anyway.

What arrives is shaped by where the household has been positioned. My mother absorbed the version that was being broadcast through the postwar suburban household, through the magazines that arrived in her mailbox, through the family that had been spared the worst while remaining altered by it. Other daughters were absorbing other versions through other channels. The girl growing up in a Black household, where her grandmothers’ communities had been sites of medical experimentation and even forced sterilization for centuries, was inheriting something the magazines on her bedside table—if there were magazines on her bedside table at all—did not name or depict. The girl in a household where her mother carried a number from the camps was inheriting something the postwar optimism could not reach. The girl in every household was inheriting something with stakes I’m not in a position to render because while I can understand heredity, I do not embody lineages that are not mine to carry.

The structural pattern was the same. The baggage differed. And the stakes varied considerably.

What my mother absorbed was the version arriving in her household through magazines and messaging—the version the marketplace was perfecting in language aimed at girls who looked like her.

Watch your figure. Keep your figure. Reduce. Slenderize. Without the right foundation, no dress will look its best.

Much of the language in the 1950s assumed that the appearance of the female body was a project that required ongoing attention. My mother inhaled this agenda like it was air.

Every generation has its instructions for the female body.

My mother’s arrived through her Aunt Iris and the magazines on her bedside table. Ours arrive through screens, feeds, podcasts, the friend with the lab panel and maybe a mother or an aunt as well. Most of them we never chose. We simply breathed them in, until they felt less like messages and more like air—less like opinions and more like facts about ourselves.

Write into one instruction about the female body—yours, or a loved ones—that arrived from somewhere outside and was absorbed as if it were true.

Set a timer for 5 minutes. In that 5 minutes I ask that you write whatever comes to mind in response to the prompt. Please don’t overthink it. Capture what arises and write. It can be in relation to the prompt or not. Just what arises in you as you take pen to paper or fingers to keyboard during that 5 minute duration.

Feel free to share your writing or your reflections in the comments below.