I didn’t grow up with just one blueprint for womanhood. I grew up with two warring empires.

My mother was college educated, independent, self-sufficient, a lover of books and powered by self determination. A woman who built her life living by the beat of her own drum and refusing to shrink for anyone.

My grandmother was her opposite in every way society demanded she be. Married at twenty-one. Four children by thirty. A former stay-at-home mother who survived poverty, domestic violence, and a generation that told her endurance was a virtue.

My mother’s message was one of female empowerment:

You can be anything you want. Education is your freedom. You don’t need a man. Anything you choose to do I expect you to do with excellence.

Meanwhile, my grandmother whispered a parallel gospel in the background. She taught me how to cook, how to clean, crochet, and garden. Not because she believed a woman’s place was in the home but because the home had been the only domain she was ever allowed to be.

But the one thing I always knew growing up is that we were safe. And that there was a special peace they both shared, no longer being subjected to my grandfathers cruel authority. But just because I was safe didn’t mean I was free from my own gender prescription.

The millennial generation was handed a different kind of cage - hyperthinness, beauty, and male validation. We learned that being a “good girl” wasn’t just about being polite it was about being pretty, pleasing, and flawlessly light.

Light in weight. Light in presence. Light in needs. Light enough to be held, but never heavy enough to be an inconvenience. We were raised on low-rise jeans, Victoria’s Secret Angels, thigh gaps, heroin chic, “You’re not like other girls,” and boys whose approval was treated like oxygen. We had to watch incredible women like Topanga give up Yale to marry dusty ass Corey Mathews, Rachel get off the plane to Paris for the emotional abuser Ross, and Carrie Bradshaw run back in the arms of Big a grown man in his 40’s who stood her up at the alter because he couldn’t process his feelings on his own.

And somewhere between all that, the dress codes, the beauty standards, the scripted romances, the curated good girl in me learned her role. Not because I wanted it. But because every story, every heroine, every cultural blueprint taught me the same lesson:

A woman can be anything… as long as she remains easy to love. Don’t have disagreements, don’t react to his treatment, and always give everything you have to him. Even if you pursue a career, take care of children, run the household you never scrimp on the adoration and labor he needs. And I spent years trying to be exactly that.