Adult Acne and My Father in the Mirror

I think one reason I am always thinking of my girlhood self is that we never stopped having the same mirror experience. It is the terrifying plot of Groundhog’s Day, where the day is a pimple. An angry one. Enflamed. I keep planning to put in the work to keep acne away, but then I forget.

But I think the benefit of forgetting is the chance to remember my father catching my 13 year old eye in the bathroom mirror, telling me that what I saw there was normal. Was more than okay. Was actually funny. “That’s a mirror popper, ain’t it?”

That’s what he asked one morning when a particularly angry pimple taunted me from a visible part of my chin. Before my cheeks could burn, he said, “I used to love those because I would try to pop it so hard it splattered the mirror.” Then he laughed. With me. In memory this was one of the stories he told me more than once, like the story about his grandmother telling him the color blue became him.

When he tells me this story, it is so hard to imagine the small boy for whom that compliment meant so much. It’s not a miracle of a sentence; it’s an observation. The ratio of this compliment to the beauty of the face I see in all his childhood pictures is as to the ratio of a bag of Grippos to a center-cut sirloin stake, cooked perfectly medium well.

No shade to Grippos. They just seem to taste better when steak isn’t an option and I wonder how a man who should have regularly eaten steak could remember Grippos? There must not have been any steak. At least that’s where my mind jumps, but that’s just an assumption that I can’t confirm or deny. Then again, if I had steak and I had Grippos and my child was hungry, I’d definitely share my steak. So “blue becomes you” might have been the only steak he had to share and he was the sharing type.

My Daddy was especially fine in the summers of 1970-1975. At least that’s what the pictures show. And from then on, he was a handsome man. So handsome that he began to miss himself years before he was gone because he didn’t like the way he looked after chemo. Cancer was a disease cruel enough to make him look the way he felt. And when I got the call to come home so as not to miss his last days, he was emaciated and looking like a shell of his essence. He knew the disease would do this to him, so he asked for a closed casket. But that’s not what I’m supposed to be thinking about. I’m supposed to think about Daddy with clear skin catching my eye in the bathroom mirror as if promising me a tomorrow that didn’t look like today. And since that man is now in my yesterdays, is it any wonder I take care of my skin like a girl who needs a caregiver?

Maybe I am giving myself acne so I can be that girl and remember that man and try to forget the last days and also try to reframe that end as the beginning of something else. Like maybe I should be grateful that he made me chase him to the spirit world. Maybe Peekaboo was more than a game; maybe it was practice for object permanence. Now you see me; now you don’t. The thing that makes you giggle is that you know he is still there. Now every time I think of Daddy gone, I remember that he was just hiding behind his hands, hands I remember when I’m in the mirror feeling like a girl.

Maybe that girl needed to personally know an unquestionably good father gone to learn what it means that the soul is eternal– so much more than what the “living” shell can hold. My friend Alphonso is a great husband and father who offered me that assurance one day. It was a day like this when I couldn’t manage to get my mind off gone. “Good daddies never leave,” Alphonso said, and I knew that he was telling the truth. Maybe I am crying because I’m being a baby too tired to find the fun in Peekaboo. Or maybe I am being that pot the chaplain told me about, the one he said would always be simmering on the backburner. Maybe I am that pot boiling over, and maybe I just have to watch the steam. Trust evaporation. Let the tears become a cloud so that my father’s spirit can be the silver lining reflecting sun.

***

Dear, dear daughter of our Daddy,

I’m writing through this cloud to a future self so this can be the day you start to take care of your fucking skin. I mean, damn. Clinique is expensive but it’s supposed to work, B. Even if you’re feeling sick with longing for a day that has passed, go ahead and keep changing your pillowcases regularly and wash your face at night and don’t forget to moisturize because we’re too old for this shit. You will thank me later.

You can use a different memory to conjure him. Remember “Revolution” at the end of Malcolm X when Spike Lee broke your heart then broke through the cloud with Arrested Development and those drums. Remember how quickly he jumped up to dance. Find a song. Play it while you wash your face.

Love,

Me

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