I loved our new home but I also came to resent it. There were no neighborhood children to play with, no convenience stores or parks within biking distance. I was stranded and lonely, an only child with no one to talk to or turn to but my mother.

Left with her in the woods, I was overwhelmed by her time and attention, a devotion that I learned could both be an auspicious privilege and have smothering consequences. My mother was a homemaker. Making a home had been her livelihood since I was born, and while she was vigilant and protective, she wasn’t what you would call coddling. She was not what I’d refer to as a “Mommy-Mom,” which was what I envied most of my friends for having. A Mommy-Mom is someone who takes an interest in everything her child has to say even when there is no actual way she gives a shit, who whisks you away to the doctor when you complain of the slightest ailment, who tells you “they’re just jealous” if someone makes fun of you, or “you always look beautiful to me” even if you don’t, or “I love this!” when you give them a piece of crap for Christmas.

But every time I got hurt, my mom would start screaming. Not for me, but at me. I couldn’t understand it. When my friends got hurt, their mothers scooped them up and told them it was going to be okay, or they went straight to the doctor. White people were always going to the doctor. But when I got hurt, my mom was livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property.

Once, when I was climbing a tree in the front yard, the notch I used to hoist myself up gave out from under my foot. I slid two feet, dragging the skin of my bare stomach on the coarse bark as I tried to regain my footing, falling six feet onto my ankle. Crying, ankle twisted, shirt ripped, my stomach scraped and bloody on either side, I was not scooped into my mother’s arms and taken to a medical professional. Instead, she descended upon me like a murder of crows.

“HOW MANY TIME MOMMY SAY STOP CLIMBING THAT TREE?!”

“Umma, I think I sprained my ankle!” I cried. “I think I have to go to the hospital!”

She hovered over my crumpled body screeching relentlessly as I writhed among the dead leaves. I could have sworn she threw a few kicks in.

“Mom, I’m bleeding! Please don’t yell at me!”

“YOU WILL HAVE THIS SCAR FOREVER! AY-CHAM WHEN-IL-EEYA?!”

“I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry!”

I apologized over and over again, sobbing dramatically. Big fat tears and insistent stuttering wails. I pulled myself toward the house with my elbows, gripping the dry leaves and cold dirt as I stiffly dragged my limp leg forward.

“Aigo! Dwaes-suh! That’s enough!”

Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn’t care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this world would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.

“Stop crying! Save your tears for when your mother dies.”

This was a common proverb in my household. In place of the English idioms my mother never learned, she coined a few of her own. “Mommy is the only one who will tell you the truth, because Mommy is the only one who ever truly love you.” Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy, I save,” she would add.

* * *

—

MY MOTHER was always trying to shape me into the most perfect version of myself. When I was an infant, she pinched my nose because she was worried it was too flat. In my elementary years, she feared I was too short, so every morning before school she’d instruct me to hold the bars of my headboard and pull my legs in an effort to stretch them out. If I furrowed my brow or smiled too widely, she’d smooth my forehead with her fingers and instruct me to “stop making wrinkles.” If I walked with a slouch, she’d push a palm between my shoulder blades and command, “Ukgae peegoo!” “Shoulders straight!”

She was obsessed with appearances and spent hours watching QVC. She phoned in orders for cleansing conditioners, specialty toothpastes, and jars of caviar-oil scrubs, serums, moisturizers, toners, and anti-aging creams. She believed in QVC products with the zeal of a conspiracy theorist. If you questioned the legitimacy of a product, she’d erupt in its defense. My mom was wholeheartedly convinced that Supersmile toothpaste made our teeth five shades lighter and Dr. Denese’s Beautiful Complexion three-piece skin-care kit shaved ten years off our faces. Her bathroom counter was an island full of glass pots and tinted jars she dipped, dabbed, rubbed, patted, and smoothed onto her face, religiously following a ten-step skin-care regimen that included a microcurrent wand for electrocuting wrinkles. Every night from the hall I could hear the clapping of her palms against her cheeks and the hum of pulsing electricity supposedly tightening her pores as she zipped and zapped, then applied layer after layer of cream.

Meanwhile, boxes of Proactiv toners piled up, shoved beneath the cabinet of my bathroom sink; bristles of a Clarisonic cleansing brush remained dry and mostly unused. I was too impatient to keep up with any kind of regimen my mother tried to impose, a source of contention that would escalate throughout my adolescence.

Her perfection was infuriating, her meticulousness a complete enigma. She could own a piece of clothing for ten years and it’d look like it’d never been worn. Never a speck of lint on a coat, a pill on a sweater, or a single scuff on a patent-leather shoe, whereas I was reprimanded constantly for destroying or abruptly losing even those belongings I most dearly cherished.

She applied the same fastidiousness to the household, which she kept immaculate. She vacuumed daily, and once a week she would have me run a duster along all the baseboards as she doused the hardwood floors in oil and smoothed them over with a washcloth. Living with my father and me must have felt like living with two oversized toddlers hell-bent on destroying her perfect world. Often my mother would erupt over some small disarray, and the two of us would look out at the same horizon and have no clue what was unclean or misplaced. If either of us spilled something on the carpet, my mother would react as though we had set it on fire. Instantaneously, she’d release a pained wail, rush to collect the QVC carpet cleaning sprays from under the sink, and push us aside for fear we would spread the stain. Then we would just hover over her in embarrassment, watching stupidly as she dabbed and sprayed at our errors.

The stakes got higher when my mother began amassing various collections of precious, delicate things. Each set had a special place in the home where it was neatly displayed and organized: Mary Engelbreit miniature painted teapots lining the bookshelves in the hallway; porcelain ballerinas on the entryway credenza, the one in third position missing two fingers, a daily reminder of the consequences of my oafishness; and blue-and-white Dutch houses on the kitchen windowsills filled with gin, two or three with corks sloppily dug into in some drunken stupor, to remind my father of his. Crystal Swarovski animals mounted the glass shelves of the living room armoire. Every birthday and Christmas, a new glistening swan, porcupine, or turtle found its place on the wall, adding to the prismatic light that projected across the living room in the early morning.