Thin-Skinned
I watch my hand tremble as I squeeze the dropper. Exhaustion? Rage? Anxiety? Probably some combination of them all. A few drops of cerulean oil puddle in my palm. I dip my fingertips in it and then anoint my face — forehead, nose, cheekbones, chin — before massaging it in. I look at myself in the mirror as my hands dance around my face. I'm tired to the point that my eyelids ache as they move, the things that normally throb with fatigue having already gone numb.
A different version of me would have just collapsed into bed without bothering to do anything to my face — I wouldn't have even removed what little bit of makeup was left clinging to it let alone spread it with serums and creams and gels. But in this realm of impossibility I find myself in — the utter futility of providing elder care to two parents simultaneously while also trying to maintain my own life and doing any of it competently — skincare (of all ridiculous things) has become my religion. I suddenly understand how fanaticism happens: an intense sense of powerlessness makes a person desperate for a saviour, no matter how unlikely and illogical that saviour may be.
Three days earlier my mother was diagnosed with a rare, progressive, and fatal neurodegenerative disease. And earlier in the day, my father berated me from the hospital bed where he's been recovering from a hip fracture and concussion. It's half-past midnight and I've just brought up the last load from the laundry room in the basement of my dad's building where I'm staying — mine, my mom's, and whatever of my dad's I've used while here in Windsor, four hours away from my life and work. I miss Tilda, who is staying with a friend on this trip, but as soothing as I find walking her amidst the care-giving chaos that dominates my time here, I'm also grateful for one less thing to do. I had good intentions of stopping at a coffee shop to get an hour or two of work done in the afternoon between errands, but the day dwindled faster than my to-do list. I never get through my to-do lists.
I will not, however, go to bed without checking off what has now become a ritual: I spread a thin layer of overnight repair serum on my face, a combination of retinol and blue tansy extract (in the morning it will be a revitalizing duo of vitamin C and peptides), and brush my teeth as it sinks in. Next I daub rejuvenation cream under my eyes, ever hopeful it will lessen the shadows that collect there as I sleep too little. And finally I seal it all with a slather of moisturizer made from a smattering of ingredients supposed to improve the tone and texture of my fifty-year-old skin.
Somehow these few minutes of spreading things on my face makes me less sad, less angry, less bitter. I feel trapped in this prison of care. It's too much for one person to carry alone and it's derailed some of the big plans I had begun work on this year. All around me other people pursue successes and happiness and progress and I feel left behind, anchored to this place of duty that I haven't chosen but cannot in good conscience leave. I want to encrust myself in resentment. But instead I tend to my skin. And as it softens, so does my heart. Even if just a little.
It's counterintuitive to me, but this new ritual is teaching me to undo some of the toughness — physical, emotional, mental — I spend so much time cultivating. It's teaching me to make my thick skin thin.
