When I was a child, the single, most important thing in the world was my mother. She was my idol, and everything I could ever have possibly wanted to be. I emulated her in every way imaginable, from the way she brushed her hair down to which foot she put her first shoe on. My twin sister, Lisette, wasn’t quite the same way. She never ran to mom like I did when she was hurt; she was usually more concerned about what had happened to the clothes she had been wearing at the time. (Lisette could have cared less about what anybody thought about her as long as Lisette was happy). Yet somehow, the bedtime ritual we maintained with our mother still stood out to her, and she made every effort to be the world’s best child for that precious half-hour slot of time.

I would kneel on the chair at my mother’s makeup table, handing her all of her beauty concoctions and potions: her nighttime moisturizer pots and her cream rinse, and I would watch, mesmerized, as the geisha before me took off all of her face paint. I could see the grey-blue bags under her eyes (the color of the froth on top of the choppy waters of nightfall) and the worry lines in her forehead, crow’s feet at her eyes. I’d hand her the washcloth that had been painstakingly folded at the edge of the sink and she’d wipe the soap from her eyes, pulling the terrycloth band from her soft brown hair and giving her head a shake, letting it cascade back into her eyes.

In my five-year-old eyes, my mother could do absolutely no wrong. She would head off to put our baby sister Nancy to bed, and you could hear her talking to Nancy through the wall to the restroom. I screwed the lids back on all of the beauty products, wiped the water off of the counter, and would turn off the light and scramble into our bedroom.

“Lissy, clean up, mama’s coming.” I would hiss, and she would roll her eyes and put down whatever she was doing (nine times out of ten, she would be playing with her dolls and telling them how she was queen of the world and how they would do her bidding. She did it with dolls simply because I refused to submit to her fascist regime: I would not be told that I would give up desserts for a month in exchange for a back rub.)

You could hear my mother’s bedroom slippers making soft noises on the carpeted halls that led to the side of the house with our room on it, and I would sit on the side of my bed, anxiously swinging my legs. Lisette would reluctantly head over to her side, sitting stoically. Mom would open the door, shut it softly behind her, and stand there for a moment, pausing, thinking about whose bed she would steal for the night.

It was usually my bed that she took, as Lisette found the whole process of bedtime rituals to be too babyish once she hit Kindergarten. One night, she actually convinced our mother to not put us to bed, and I cried myself to sleep that night, my face burrowed in my security blanket, and when I woke up the next morning, I pummeled my mother silly with my lithe little fists, anger seeping through my pores, shouting that she hated me now.

The ritual, for obvious reasons, remained in our family.

She would sit on my bed nine times out of ten, anyway, (only Lisette’s when Lissy had had a bad day in some form or another…bad grade, fight with her friends, etc.) and I would scoot until my body pressed against the cold wall. My mother would get in beside me, scooting over until she was pressed up against me, and I would usually let out a tiny giggle. Lisette would get in after my mother, setting a book on her stomach and leaning up on one elbow.

Mom smelled like cold cream and had very cold hands which she would use to scrape the hair out of our eyes; the hair of our father, Damien: black as pitch and eyes that flashed ice blue. She opened the book and moved it away from her eyes so that we both could see it, and Lisette made it a habit of hers to pretend that she could care less about the book, averting her eyes. We both knew, however, that she would simply listen and slowly turn her head more and more in our direction until she was looking full-on at the book again. Mom would laugh at that, and I would revel in the sound…like falling glass, pooling on the floor and tinkling.

The book would be finished all too soon, and we would hold hands, the three of us, each of us contributing something in a circular formation in the way of a prayer, which usually started with each other and ended with hoping that a new toy would go on sale at the general store (that was when mom would cut us off with an ‘amen’). And Lisette would get out of the bed and put the book up, and mom would get out too, and stand over my bed, pulling up my covers tightly under my chin and bending down to give me a big kiss on the forehead. The smell of cold cream would overwhelm me, and I would revel in it.

“I love you, Lorelei.” She would say softly, smoothing the covers out with the palm of her calloused hand.

“I love you too, mama.” And I would sit up, weight applied to my hands, for one final hug. And she would laugh and ease me back down with another kiss, and go repeat the process for my twin.

“I love you both.” She’d say, standing at the door. I would usually blow her a kiss from my position in bed, curled up in the fetal position with my blanket (an old shawl of hers, from back when she was dating my daddy). I didn’t have to look to know that Lisette was, if not actually asleep, doing a damn good job of pretending to be.

The door would click shut and I would lie in the dark, sniffling the air for the smell of my mother’s cold cream. And I would lie curled up on my side, my face buried in her shawl, glad to be one of the luckiest children on the face of the earth. My dreams were endless and pleasant, and I would wake up each morning with a smile on my face.

There is no better gift to the world than a child who feels loved.