My Inheritance: Mom's Clinique Clarifying Lotion "Clarifiante" 2

I'm 56 and I still don't get the T-zone.

Seven years ago, on April 25, I lost my Mom. She went suddenly — leukemia, 10 days. My Dad, my brother, and I were all in shock. Our savior was my sister-in-law’s father, a retired mortician, who gave us many helpful tips, including this one: go to the bathroom and clear it out. Now.

Riding the wave of that initial grief is like surfing, the surge lifted me as I emptied drawers and medicine cabinets into black plastic bags. The waste is terrible, but you have to keep the arms moving, or you will drown.

You’re in a race against time. For as powerfully as the wave carries you in, it will suck back out, ditching you alone on the sand, seized by a sudden sentimentality for an expired Albuterol inhaler. The intimacy of these objects is truly unbearable.

I was on a roll— donate, toss, keep — but the longer you go, the arms slow. Exhausted, I opened a medicine cabinet packed with lotions, cremes, and skincare. Mom had this way of using all the product except the last little bit, the same way I eat a bag of potato chips and leave one to prove I didn’t finish it.

Then I found one of these, almost full.

Cue that sound a fresh-out-of-the-box rosegold MacBook makes when you start it for the first time.

Speaking as a girl who came of age in the make-up obsessed, class-obsessed Alabama 80s, I cannot exaggerate the idolization we held for Clinque products. This was the era of the department store, the bright lights, and shiny counters. The Clinque Clinicians were our scientific fairy godmothers in white lab coats, promising to sculpt our blotchy teen faces into a Charlie’s Angel. Bibbity-Bobbity!

I obsessed over the Clinique Computer, which determined your skin type, in awe of the mysterious “T-Zone” as if it were a sort of Bermuda Triangle. I’m sure the Clinicians grew tired of me, a decidedly unpaying customer, sliding the silver knobs back and forth hoping to shrink my pores.

We were middle-class class and my parents didn’t financially prioritize my fitting in high school. No designer jeans or Ralph Lauren polos. “The JCPenney Fox is perfectly fine.” My make-up consisted of shoplifted Maybelleine’s Blooming Blues and Cover Girl foundation, two shades too dark and too orange for my pink skin, cutting the dreaded line along my jaw.

Popular girls had the Clinique space-age silver sliding boxes of eyeshadow and those tiny green tubs of shiny lip gloss they applied with a lip brush. If only, I yearned. With time, I’ve learned that the only way to like your face is to decide you like your face, but back then, I put all my hopes and supermodel dreams into makeup.

The more things change, the more…including Black Honey lip gloss, which is apparently still a thing and yeah, I still love it, too.

I can only imagine what it was like for Rose to sort through her mother’s things after Laura died, given the importance placed on symbolic objects in the books—the fiddle, the china shepherdess, the Big Green Book, a tin cup, a shiny penny… The Little House books hadn’t reached icon status yet, but they were very popular. Today, Laura’s little house in Mansfield, Missouri, is a museum.

Laura wrote in a letter dated five years before her death that Rose should take whatever jewelry she wanted and sell the rest. I suspect Laura knew Rose didn’t share her same fondness for primping and accessorizing. Rose’s single-authored writing isn’t filled with descriptions of Blackberry buttons or ostrich feathers, whereas those details were clearly forever etched in Laura’s memory.

Like my mom, Laura loved looking good. She’s picture here in her signature red velvet dress and jewelry.

Like Laura, Mom had more money in the later part of her life to spend on jewelry, clothes, and products. I took the best of Mom’s expensive creams home, which I have used liberally over the years, slathering eye cream on my knees or serums on my feet at will. TBH, lotion is lotion to me.

The only product that remains now is that Clinique bottle.

Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer Caroline Fraser’s take on Rose and Laura's relationship is that despite Laura’s love for her parents and despite her real-life Horatio Alger story that in the end, “…somehow, the bond with her daughter had proved the most difficult trial of all.”

Mom and I were able to repair from the screaming matches of my teenage years, and my time as The Family Disappointment through my 20s and 30s. We didn’t have Deep Talks. She expressed her love by taking me shopping during my annual Christmas visit. I was broke, but damn if I didn’t have Kenneth Cole boots. Once a year, I’d run around White House/Black Market like a contestant on Supermarket Sweep. Seven years later, I’ve gone up a size and my wardrobe feels the pinch. I miss those bougie boots.

Jonathan Van Ness would no doubt gasp in horror that I’m still applying what must be (at least) decade-old toner to my face. But the internet tells me alcohol has an “indefinite shelf life,” and the primary ingredient is “water/aqua/eau,” which I now know is three ways of saying “water.”

Is the toner hurting or helping my face? I can’t tell. But Mom taught me to finish what I start.

Precious.

Every morning, I dab my face, turn the folded toilet paper square over, and admire the dirt removed, mostly makeup I never fully washed off the night before.

I keep expecting the bottle to empty, but it’s a Catholic version of the Miracle of Hanukkah. And no, I’m not the most consistent skin caretaker, and yes, maybe I’m hoarding this last ounce. My niece gave me a bottle of witch hazel last Christmas. One day, that bottle will be the replacement.

Shout out to The Keepthings for the content inspo. I wrote a similar essay for this pub called “Mom’s Lipstick.” These essays, “stories of lost loved ones inspired by the things they left behind,” are always good. The best way to read them is on Instagram, The Keepthings, @thekeepthings

*Argh! Just hit send and realized I misspelled “Hanukkah.”