I think it’s safe to say that one of the hardest parts of raising daughters, besides mood swings, cattiness, constant screaming and the fact that it will eventually fall on me to show them how to use a tampon, is helping cultivate their self-esteem in an image obsessed society.

The universe has helped me out here by making sure the extra 30 lbs I’m carrying around will not leave me, no matter what I do. So, my daughters see things like hip dips and cellulite and pants that won’t button and what I like to think is a more accurate representation of a woman’s body than what they might see on Social media.

They’re not on social media yet, but I am, and sometimes I’ll scroll past these teen and twenty something influencers, posed and filtered just so, and I’ll think “Thank God I grew up in a time when that didn’t exist.”

And not just because of the blow it would have been to my younger self’s fragile self esteem, which it would have been.

But mostly because my goodness, the catfishing I would have done with all those filters at my disposal in my 20s.

Case in point, this picture. You may notice something about it that doesn’t look quite right, and you’re not wrong. But first, a little backstory.

The year was 2003. At 18, I was technically an adult. Did I dress like an adult? No. Did I behave like an adult? Also no.

It was a summer day at the lake with friends. You’re probably thinking “18 year old girls at the lake, okay so tanning oil and magazines.” And you’re correct. Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie were hotter than hot and everyone wanted to be that tan and that blonde.

And I did too, but because I am who I am, while my friends worked on their tans, I waded around the pier, stalking the biggest bass I’d ever seen.

He was huge, and I was going to catch him. I had no fishing pole, no tackle, no bait. Because we were 18 and this is not something normal 18-year-old girls bring to the lake. But he would be mine, one way or another.

Problem was, I couldn’t go farther than knee deep, because I wasn’t wearing an actual swimsuit. Bikini bottoms gave me a muffin top, or so I believed at the time, so I was wearing black underwear in the very popular hipster style, paired with a black tube top. The combination basically looked like censor bars. (See above)

I also had a wool cardigan over this, to hide any possible back fat. Pro tip – wool does not breathe and is not appropriate lake wear.

But man, this bass. I’d never wanted something so badly.

So I found a stick. I raided my friend’s grandpa’s boat house and found some line and a hook. Somehow, someone produced a Kraft single. (It was me. I produced the Kraft single. From my purse. Someone had recently forgotten the cheese on my Big Mac and I was not going to let that happen again.)

I dragged that thing through the water for only about an hour and a half, and voila. That bass was mine.

I’m pretty sure my friends were less than enthused, but I knew my Dad would be prouder of me than he’d ever been in his life, so I threw the fish, stick and all, on the floor of my Corolla and drove it home.

My dad was every bit as proud as I thought he’d be and immediately suggested a picture. And this is where the story goes south.

Given all the thought I put into my outfit, it’s ironic that I had on no makeup. I’m very fair skinned and so without make up I look an awful lot like one of the Brewers racing sausages. So the original picture, which I can no longer find, features my dad, the bass, and this guy:

“No matter,” I thought. “No one will see it.”

And so the bass was eaten, the picture boxed, and that was that.

Until three years later, when Facebook had arrived and I was searching for the perfect profile picture.

“What will attract the most men-folk?” I asked myself. “Oh I’ve got it. A dead fish. Do I have anything like that?”

Bingo.

I pulled this picture out of the shoebox where I kept my prized possessions.

The problem, I deduced, was that while the dead fish might be attractive to the 20-something boys I was hoping to lure into posting on my Facebook wall, I feared my makeup-less face would not be. What could be done?

It was serendipitous that staring at me from inside the same shoebox were some homecoming pictures. One of them was roughly from the same angle and distance. I grabbed a scissors and some glue. Ten minutes later, the dead bass was displayed next to this face:

Nevermind that the new face was covered in so much Covergirl Aquasmooth that it looked like I’d been dead longer than the fish.

“It’s perfect,” I said. Now all I had to do was take a picture of the doctored picture, plug my digital camera into my computer, upload the new picture, save it on my desktop, upload it to Facebook, make it my profile picture, sit back, and wait for the comments.

Imagine if you will what would have happened to this picture with today’s tools at my fingertips. I’d be glowing and my eyelashes would be touching my hairline, at the very least.

So you see, even at 21 I was probably not ready for both what I could see and what I could post on social media.

At 40 — absolutely. Most days I leave the house makeupless and in very unflattering clothing, muffin top and back fat be damned. If I caught this beauty of a fish tomorrow, a very different woman would be holding him and I can promise you it would be a blow to absolutely no one’s self esteem if they scrolled past it.

So maybe that’s the answer, maybe I make my kids wait for social media until 40. That seems feasible.

At the very least, whenever they finally log in, they will have been told this horror story. And probably they’ll have been forced to sign a contract holding them to minimal filter use. And absolutely no Covergirl Aquasmooth.