Eulogy: On Artifice and Inheritance

I was raised by the most beautiful woman in the world.

Eartha Kitt, Dorothy Dandridge, Diahann Carroll had nothing on my mom. Neither did I.

That's what I believed, anyway. I'd absorbed the message that lighter was better, that her golden-brown skin sat higher on some invisible hierarchy than my deeper brown. I knew this wasn't true intellectually—my father was handsome, and I looked like him—but I felt it anyway. That's how colorism works. It distorts your self-worth.

I wanted to look like her. I studied her face the way some people study religious icons, searching for proof that I might one day possess even a fraction of her beauty. I was a child seeking initiation into her mysteries, already sensing that certain acts are sacred, that ritual creates meaning, that we enter into the spirit of things through ceremony. Her rituals were closed to me. I watched from outside the temple.

My mother emigrated from Jamaica in 1968 when she was eleven years old. She and her siblings arrived in Black River Falls, Wisconsin with their mother and stepfather to become the only Black family in town. The racism they endured was, as she would later tell me, soul-destroying.

But America wasn't her first experience of not belonging. In Jamaica, her homeland, she'd been teased for her appearance too. Her grandfather's Scottish blood had given her red hair and a complexion that made her different even among her own people. By the time she arrived in Wisconsin at eleven, her hair had darkened. The red-haired girl who didn't fit in Jamaica became the Black girl who didn't fit in America. She learned early that her body would be wrong to someone no matter where she stood.

She survived by making herself impeccable. Not a hair out of place. Not a moment unguarded.

She was always composed, never taking up too much space. And she worked harder than her peers, taking on a cleaning job alongside her middle school coursework.

Her manners? Mindful. Her speech? Precise. Her posture? Perfect.

She grew into a lovely woman, gracious and refined.

She loved flowers. I can remember the notes of lily, rose, jasmine, and sandalwood in her favorite perfume (White Diamonds by Elizabeth Taylor, naturally!)

She spoke with a soft, lilting voice that still carried the faintest hint of her Jamaican accent, clinging to certain words.

She treated her self-care like sacred time. A holy one-woman ritual she'd learned from someone she admired in her early twenties. Bubble baths, skincare routines, makeup application, reverence for the implements of her artifice… none of this was vanity.

It was armor. It was art. It was the execution of her strategy.

My mother was the kind of beautiful that made people stop talking when she entered a room.

But I was darker. Rounder. Louder in ways that made her uncomfortable. "Too American," she'd say when I was too much. Her disapproval made me feel ashamed. I kept hoping that somehow, if I tried hard enough, I could become more like her.

The day she offered to do my makeup felt like coronation day.

Since I was still in elementary school, she made it clear this was a one-time deal. But I was eager for my chance to finally look and feel beautiful.

We stood together in the upstairs bathroom. I held perfectly still while she painted my face with the same careful precision she used on herself, imagining the transformation.

The makeup felt alien. Suffocating. But it felt like a small price to pay to experience a reprieve from being an ugly duckling.

When she handed me the mirror, I was nervous and excited to see the results.

I expected to see a prettier version of myself. A version of myself that looked like her.

Instead, I was greeted with a clown face.

Her foundation made my deeper brown skin look ashen. Her lipstick made my already full lips look cartoonish. The way she'd lined my eyes made them look huge, like they didn't belong on my face.

All of those negative emotions cascaded out of my mouth like the tears that were pouring down my face. I felt so ugly. So disappointed. Instead of looking beautiful like my mother, I looked ridiculous.

"You look beautiful," she said softly, confused by my reaction.

She didn't see what I saw. She'd given me her idea of beauty, applied with her techniques, using her products. In her eyes, I looked lovely.

But I was hurt. There was nothing that could make me look the way I'd hoped.

She never tried to put makeup on me again. I think she was hurt, too. But we never talked about it.

What I understand now, over 30 years later, is that she was trying to share her magic, the survival tools she'd spent decades perfecting. What she didn't understand was that her magic wouldn't work on someone who wasn't her.

What I also understand now is that her fear of me being "too much," too American, too loud, too visible—that wasn't about control. It was about love.

She was terrified that I wouldn't be able to thrive in American society if I didn't learn to blend in: smoothing my edges, making myself small and safe the way she had. She was trying to protect me from the pain she experienced during her first years in this country.

But I couldn't wear her armor. It didn't fit me any better than her makeup did.

Will & Testament

My mother wrote me letters my whole life.

Handwritten, deliberate, saved in shoeboxes and desk drawers. She wrote when I moved into my college dorm. She wrote when I got married, when I had children, when I moved across the country. Her voice on paper was softer than her voice in person. More vulnerable. In her letters, she said things she couldn't say out loud.

I didn't know how precious they were until she was gone.

My mother died in December 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of my attempting to build a business, in the middle of my life. We'd had a complicated relationship. She was conservative where I was curious. She valued safety; I valued truth. She wanted me to be careful, contained, safe. I wanted to be exactly as dangerous as she feared I might become.

After she died, I found a letter she'd written me during my first year of college. Over twenty years old, folded and refolded, tucked away and forgotten. I don't know why that one surfaced. But when I read it again, I couldn't stop crying.

"Tiffany, if you love me, please take good care of yourself."

Then she explained exactly what kind of self-care I should give myself to demonstrate my love for her. The rituals. The routines. The sacred time she'd learned to carve out for herself as survival.

Her love for me was so deep. Even when we didn't see eye to eye. Even when she feared who I was becoming. Even when I couldn't understand that her fear was just love wearing different clothes.

After she died, I kept trying to honor that letter by grieving the way I thought she would have wanted—quietly, efficiently, without disrupting business as usual. Keep calm and carry on. Don't discuss your struggles publicly because people will use that information against you or for their own entertainment rather than responding to cries for help.

She never let circumstances get in the way of her achievements. Neither would I.

Grieving in Her Image

The cruel thing about grief is that life moves on no matter what you're feeling.

I was reading an email from a colleague less than a month after my mother died. The tears in my eyes distorted my vision and my face flushed. I put down my laptop and tried to focus on the glittering Christmas ornaments that were a few feet away from where I sat.

The rest of the email would have to wait.

My mom had died less than a month ago, but I was already worn out from grieving. No matter how much I reminisced, wailed, raged, or wall-slid, she wasn't coming back. And I wasn't feeling better.

I decided to pull myself together and get back to work. If "Keep Calm and Carry On" was a person, I knew her as Mommy. I thought this was what she would've wanted me to do. I was wrong. I hadn't fully absorbed what she taught me in that letter.

So I did what any good daughter would do: I tried to wear my mother's face again.

I put on her version of strength. The kind that doesn't crack in public, that handles everything with perfect composure, that never lets anyone see you struggle. I thought if I could just perform her kind of resilience, I could shortcut my way through grief.

Just like I'd once tried to become beautiful using my mother's makeup, I was trying to protect myself the way she had. But her composure had never been about toughness. It was how a soft, fearful woman had learned to keep herself safe.

It didn't fit me any better in my late thirties than it had at eight years old.

But I could only maintain the performance for a few weeks. I didn't have the energy to be the version of myself she would have approved of, or the version I thought my clients needed me to be.

All my careful masking fell away, and what remained was just me. Quiet. Still reserved. Still careful. But grieving, opinionated, and no longer willing to pretend I was fine.

The Sacred Work Underneath the Ritual

You can't shortcut grief. You can't perform your way through it, and you can't honor someone by becoming them.

It took me years to understand what my mother was actually teaching me in that letter. She wasn't prescribing her rituals or her routines. She was teaching me that loving yourself is sacred work, that caring for yourself is an act of devotion. Survival requires rituals, yes, but rituals that fit your own body, your own life, your own skin.

She taught it the only way she knew how. Through the methods and survival strategies she had spent a lifetime perfecting. And I couldn't wear those any better than I could wear her foundation. But the lesson underneath was always the same: take care of yourself, because you are worth caring for.

I carry this lesson into my work now. Artifice is sacred. It's power. Not a mask to hide behind, but a way to become more fully yourself.

Artifice: A Legacy of Power

My mother understood something that took me decades to learn. Artifice is not deception. It is craft. It is the deliberate shaping of how you present yourself to the world, and it requires knowing yourself deeply enough to know what deserves to be seen.

She crafted herself with intention. Every choice was strategic: the perfume, the posture, the precise way she spoke. She understood that how you present yourself shapes how people receive you, and she refused to leave that to chance. In a world that wanted to diminish her, she made herself impossible to overlook.

This is what I do now. I help people find their own face. The version of themselves that is true and powerful and impossible to forget. I call it brand strategy because that's the language of business. But what I'm really teaching is what my mother taught me: artifice is sacred work.

The women who come to me are often wearing someone else's makeup. They've copied the strategies of people they admire, adopted voices that don't belong to them, built businesses that look successful but feel like costumes. They remind me of myself in that bathroom, hoping that someone else's foundation would make me beautiful.

It never works. You cannot become memorable by copying someone else's surface. You become memorable by learning your own face so well that you can make it luminous.

The Armor I Inherited, The Armor I Forged

I will never look like my mother in the way I once hoped.

But I inherited other things from her. Her work ethic. Her storytelling ability. Her understanding that self-care is survival. Her refusal to settle for less than she deserved. These fit me. I wear them every day.

And I am adding elements of my own. The wildness she tried to tame. The curiosity she found frightening. The boundaries that make me dangerous in the best sense of the word. The courage to be exactly as much as I am.

This is what it means to craft yourself: understanding what you inherited, discovering what fits, and creating what's missing. You take what was given to you and shape it into something new. Something that honors where you came from while becoming fully your own.

My mother survived by making herself perfect. I survive by making myself real. Both are valid forms of armor. Both require craft. Both are acts of power.

The Inheritance I Claimed

I finally look like my mother.

I know my own face well enough to make it beautiful on my own terms. The same is true for my business, my brand, my life.

Five years after her death, I am finally comfortable in my own skin. I know what works for me now. I know what I inherited and what I built and what still needs creating. And I know that my business, my brand, my message, my magic belongs to me alone.

I look like my mother because I learned what she was actually trying to teach me all along: Love yourself enough to take care of yourself. Treat your self-care as sacred. Craft yourself with intention.

I am doing that, Mom. Just not the way you expected.