I tried to suppress the guilt I felt at my husband giving me the day off from the construction work we did together. I was having a spa day with my mom. She was an aesthetician, and a good one at that. It was my birthday and so she had scheduled me in on her day off. What awaited me was an interrupted day of services.  

"Your mom and I planned this last week. Have a good time today. Don't think about work." 

And so he went out in the dark, early morning chill of the winter month. I relished in not having to think about work, about the job I did because I needed the money, about the work I did because I really didn't know what else to do with my life, about easily the hardest work I had ever done period.  

My shower lasted longer than four and a half minutes (I had timed myself), I drank coffee out of something other than my Stanley travel mug, and my wardrobe choice for the day didn't include snow pants. They were creature comforts that I liked to think I didn't need to get through a day but there was something about the meditation (and the rarity) of my process today that shifted the banal and every day into a guilty pleasure. 

~ ~ ~ 

Her hands waved above me, a therapeutic mist resting down upon my face.  I felt her smooth fingertips upon my forehead as she gently smoothed out my frown lines. My eyes welled with tears, which I hoped she could not see in the dim light of that spa room, only because I didn't know how to explain them.

Part of it was simply tenderness. In a time and space in my life when creature comforts and pampering made up the minority of my thought process and certainly my time, having a day off where my skin was massaged, calming music was played, no grunting or gritting my teeth was necessary felt so good and yet so foreign, I could cry. Part of it was also, despite it being the very day I turned a year older and shouldn't have needed it so much, I sometimes just needed my mom. The bad days I had as a kid, as a teen, as a young woman, she would make us some tea and paint my nails as I tried to make sense of my mind and heart. She would rub my back or feet with scented lotion and tell me stories that would make me laugh. 

I was confused in life. I was disappointed, in my self and in my circumstances. I had made decisions I regretted and the only consolation to those feelings was to absorb them and move on. No fixing could happen. I couldn't go back. I couldn't change what I had done or hadn't done. 

The pungency of something like brandy sparked my nostrils. "What was that?"

"Toner."

"It smells like brandy." I smiled.

"The one for oily skin smells like tequila."

"I am glad I have dry to norma then."

I heard her smirk, that familiar sound that painted the look on her face without needing to see it.  

"Now relax." 

Stop talking is what that meant, and I was grateful for it. 

"From now on I am going to treat you like a client." She smoothed out my brow again. "And it's considered a compliment to fall asleep." 

Nearly an hour of repeated lotions and face masks, cleansing steam and more brandy scented lotion, I nearly did fall asleep. I sleepily pulled on the robe and clumsily stuffed my feet back into the disposable slippers to meet my mom out at the fireside. She was chatting with another client who was seated in front of the fireplace with a tea and a magazine. As I approached, another client was ushered into the spa area and greeted my mother by name. 

I felt an impromptu, inalienable pride in that moment. My mother was a professional. She was amazing at her job, not only in technique but in also -and to me more importantly- in conduct. She was the epitome of grace and tenderness but with a reservation that was both unfamiliar to me and absolutely part of her draw. I was used to the mom who would squeal and gab, gossip and swoon with me. In this moment, when I was wrapped in a fancy white robe, plushy lipped and giggly with two glasses of wine, my mother had her name on the wall in awards and accreditations, clients who frequented the spa for her touch alone. 

She filled my glass again with wine and sat me down at her manicure table. 

"Your skin looks great," she said as she set up her tools. "I use a magnifying light in the facial and your skin looks amazing."

"I have you to thank for that. Can't take credit for good genetics." 

"What do you use on your skin." 

"Apricot scrub." 

She grimaced. "How often?"

"Every day." 

Her eyes pinched shut, her nose scrunched. "Every day." 

I couldn't help but laugh. "What? I'm not supposed to scrub my face with a paste of crushed walnut shells? Sounds actually kind of primeval when I say it like that." 

"We can do better." She smiled back. She took my hands in hers, studying my nails. 

Even from the other side of the table, I could see the similarities in our hands. Though my fingers were longer, my fingers had the same crooked fingers and knuckles. I had seen those same fingers on my mother's mother, and her mother as well. My sisters had those hands and likely the daughters that came after us would have them too. They were the hands that I had grimaced at my entire adolescence and one of the first things my husband had told me he loved about me, long before he knew me or even knew my hands. 

After soaking my fingertips, my mother made quick work of transforming the dried cuticles and chipped nails that I had come in which. I almost could have called them smooth, all the credit of which would go to my mother's handiwork. She asked me about work, about my marriage and my writing. I told her honestly -because all my defenses had fallen two glasses of wine ago. I did my best not to cry because I didn't want her to feel bad for me, or to activate her maternal guilt and worry but also because I wasn't sad. I was under the influence of melancholy spa music and in the throes of much needed girl time, mother-daughter time. Nostalgia had flooded me and I was still reeling from it's heady effects.

She handed me the array of nail color chips to choose from. I chose something that I thought befit a 26-year-old. Not flashy or tacky, but hopefully elegant and refined. I had always been her daughter that tried to hard, that thought too much about simple things, who overanalyzed and picked apart, and stressed out and wore myself out. 

She helped me put my boots on so as not to ding my freshly done nails. We laughed about how long it had been since she had to do that and she confessed she has to help her clients do up their jackets and shoes all the time. 

I walked with my hands in front of me, fingers splayed apart, grabbing the car door and my purse with concerted dexterity for my nails best interest, full well knowing that the next day I would destroy the polish and my hands again when I went back to work.

We gabbed more in the car as she drove me home but I never quite recovered from the melancholia I caught. Nostalgia and the gripping reality that I had grown and changed in many ways and in some ways I hadn't at all. Once home, I collapsed onto the couch and descended into a slumber that my entire afternoon had been preparing me for.  

When my husband got home, upon his clothes and face was the dust and grime of concrete that was so familiar. How was his day, how had work been. 

"A light day," he said and I was relieved. "How was the spa?"

Glancing down at my nails, I saw that the texture from the couch had pressed into the impressionable polish, a delicate cross hatching. 

"It was exactly what I needed."