There are so many tiny moments in a life — a million things that you think don’t matter at the time. We don’t know what determines the moments that will have the biggest impact on us, nor can we understand the value in the ones that have been forgotten. The who we become is born of big experiences certainly, but also as a result of little insignificant snippets of life that go virtually unnoticed until you look back one day and realize they were everything.
It wasn’t until recently that I understood this on a fundamental level. I was standing in front of the Clinique counter and suddenly was overcome with a memory so powerful that although it was over 35 years ago, the image felt raw and fresh. Just like the smell of Crayola crayons transports me back to third grade, standing in front of that counter brought me back to my teens and to my mother buying me my first skincare products.
I suspect that the emotional power of this brand has little to do with skincare or what the products were designed to do. But it has everything to do with deep connection — and it has everything to do with the thread that runs through my relationship with my mother.
It’s the thing my mind keeps swerving to every time I see the iconic green packaging of Clinique products or when I apply my Borghese Fango mud mask. In this sense, skincare can be regarded as a kind of memoir. There is a story, and within that story, there are other truer deeper stories beneath the one that we generally see at first glance.
I had bad skin as an adolescent. Really bad skin. Not acne-prone skin, but really oily, with a scattering of blackheads that dotted my T-zone and huge zits that would sprout often on my chin and forehead.
I hated my skin. My dream was to have clear skin and small pores, like my sister who was blessed with good skin from my father’s side of the family. During those years, I wept with shame and railed against the unfairness of the gene pool. Why doesn’t my sister get pimples? I would question.
But I was the one with bad skin; I had my mother’s skin. And so we would get facials together and she would buy me skincare and show me how to use it. And I would hang out with her in her bathroom as she did her skincare routine and she’d talk to me about the importance of taking care of our skin and sprinkle anecdotes from her youth, and that eventually led us to other, deeper conversations.
It wasn’t until recently that I fully understood the significance of those moments: it was something I alone did with my mother. My sister, the one with the good skin, and my other sister, who was then too young to have skin be a thing, were not part of this private world. It was our special time together, although I couldn’t understand that yet…more life would have to be experienced.
Looking back now, it was in these precious moments with my mother’s undivided attention that I learned the value of self-care. That she was teaching me to value myself enough to prioritize self would go undetected until now. It was interwoven into the fabric of my everyday life and in my interaction with her. How powerfully I carry that with me, still.
Skincare can be many things. Too often it’s reduced to vanity or self-indulgence. But what skincare has held for me is a place of connection with the one person who loved me the most: my mother.
The sacredness in the mother-daughter relationship isn’t made up of grand gestures or big events, but dedicated, loving attention — that space of true connection that becomes the most impactful and teachable moment.
Her efforts in holding space for me alone led to a positive relationship between my mother and me that survives to this day. She offered me what every mother should offer their daughter: enough one on one time to make me feel special.
And you know what’s so intrinsically beautiful to me? That it seeped its way into my being the same way I imagine baseball is ingrained in the hearts of many men who have memories of watching the game with their father.
That time with my mother formed a bridge that carries me to this day. It’s weaved into the tapestry of my lifelong bond with her. Although our personalities are very different, we have skincare in common. Still.
She is in her 70’s now and she still takes care of her skin as she did back then, and she still recommends products and treatments to me. She doesn’t need my research, she does her own. We compare recent product purchases and give each other ad hoc reviews. And when either one of us gets a particularly good facial or treatment, we immediately tell the other.
I don’t know if we get to decide what it is we allow to influence us or if events in our lives are destined to unfold in a certain predetermined way. What I have come to understand is that nothing is wasted, nothing is insignificant. Every moment with a loved one has the potential to shape you, to open you up and reveal beautiful, human gifts.
As a mother myself, I understand how we can’t truly know what actions will have the biggest impact on our kids. It’s almost never until later that we can draw a line between one thing and another thing, connecting the dots that are sprinkled throughout the map of our lives.
Our work as daughters and as mothers is to trust that someday we will understand what those dot-moments mean so that when the unremarkable is revealed to us as magical we will say, oh, now I understand, and say thank you.
Happy Mother’s Day