The day wasn’t exactly off to a relaxing start when I realized my daughter and I were facing each other, arms crossed in exactly the same position, feet planted firmly. My shoes are NOT on the wrong feet, she insisted, and I DON’T need a coat. Fine. Wrong-shoe-footed and bare-armed we went into the 40-degree early March air. A lovely day for the spa, with the totally chill mindset to match.
We were headed to Spa Castle, the famous compound in College Point, Queens, where a new “generational serenity” package awaited. The invitation sounded a bit like preparation for retirement, but with the assurance that even my four-year-old would enjoy the offerings, we buckled up and headed up the Jackie Robinson Parkway to the unassuming back street where the massive cobalt-and-white edifice stands.
Truth be told, I had been waiting for this moment for, oh, about a decade. You see, I am the mother of three wonderful boys who have never expressed a single preference when it comes to soap or other bath products, and who don’t mind it if I test their cleanliness by sniffing the backs of their necks. (Who else is going to do it? They seem to appreciate—at least for now—my interest.) So when my fourth child was a girl, there were thrills and surprise, and there was also, hovering in the far-off distance, the idea that one day we would get our nails done together.
That day came sooner than expected. Perhaps because she was bouncing around a house filled with testosterone, my daughter was all about tiaras and unicorns and tutus and “pink is my favorite color” just about as soon as she could pronounce any of those words. She started coming with me to the nail salon, and she freaking loved it. There were not that many spaces for her that are suffused (despite the not-insignificant number of male clientele—this is Brooklyn!) with girly vibes, and she was a sponge for them, batting her eyelashes at the ladies wielding their nail files and squinting hard at the difference between Essie’s Ballet Slippers and Mademoiselle.
My local mega-spa is not the only institution that has cottoned on to this kind of interest. At Moar Gut, a chic-looking place in Salzburg, Austria, you can fine-tune your baby’s early development with baby yoga, baby massage, and something called “baby floating” that looks just as adorable as it sounds. At the Royal Champagne spa in Champillon, France, you can book a treatment for your six-year-old crafted by Bonpoint: “Once upon a time,” the spa menu reads, “Because it’s never too early to introduce beauty and wellbeing to every one of us.” The Cheval Blanc spa at the St. Bart’s outpost offers a suite of “my first Guerlain” skin-care experiences.
I couldn’t quite swing a trip to the Caribbean on a random Sunday, so when the Spa Castle rep reassured me that four was not (as I suspected) just a tad too young for what they had in mind, I didn’t take much convincing. At the spa itself, it was a slightly different story. “Our youngest client ever!” the receptionist exclaimed, peering over the counter at my tow-headed toddler. We followed her down a corridor, dimly lit by faux candles and bordered by slim gulleys filled with obsidian stones—not, I had to quickly assure my daughter, for picking up and putting in her pockets. Two massage tables awaited us, and my daughter was immediately game for the challenge of scaling hers—a playground inside! A boost, several towels propped around her head, and she was ready for her facial. “What do you use to cleanse…” the technician began before trailing off with the realization that this girl’s face had only ever met a washcloth, and she wasn’t going to have much to say when it came to her nonexistent skin-care routine.
At this point, I was face down on the massage table while my masseuse pulled my limbs and pressed on the precise point on my trapezius that I seemed to have been clenching since our president started a new global war. I am something of a glutton for spas, and this guy was good. (And proof, by the way, that you don’t necessarily need to go to the fanciest places to find truly magic hands.) The only problem was that while I was entering that blissful state you never want to end, my daughter was already whispering to ask me when exactly this annoyance would cease. I had explained to her that she was going to get lots of creams put on her face (usually a winning activity she likes to draw out in the morning precisely when I’m trying to leave the house), but the real appeal had been the promise of lots of pools to play in. This little session on a table that probably reminded her of the pediatrician’s office was merely a distraction from the main event. Eventually, we gave in and I handed her my phone, where the beep baddam bum bum of Peppa began to meld gently with the babbling brook soundtrack in the background; I snuck a look and was relieved to find she had entered something like a meditative state of her own. “The fact that she was even whispering,” my own therapist whispered to me as I flipped back to front. “Legendary.”
And maybe she did intuit the general magic of a spa, even if the more hands-on elements were not her cup of tea. It’s a place out of time, where the tick-tock of the minutes that can rule your life as a mother, and is subsequently imposed on your life as a toddler, fades away. Released from the ambient muzak and dim lights of the massage room, she bounded upstairs to the outdoor pool. On this brisk and overcast day, I might have kept us indoors where the vibe was a cross between municipal pool and the mall, but at least the temperature was steamy. She was having none of it; we had taken ourselves to a place where there were four pools on the roof alone, and we were going to try all of them. And then we tried the inside pool. And then we ate French fries and sipped pink Vitamin Water. What was not to love?
At that point we were skating on thin ice when it came to the lack of naptime, so I suggested we do our final dip and then make our way home. (A KitKat was purchased as a bribe for the car; I didn’t have four kids without learning some tricks.) It was then that we discovered, adjacent to the locker rooms, the whirlpools and hot tubs where you could bathe entirely naked, and so we waddled around in the nude and our plastic slides for another 30 minutes or so. Finally, I got her to the showers to rinse off, where we sat on little, turned-over plastic buckets and banished the faintest memory of my nightly admonishment to “keep the water in the tub!,” spraying each other like we were playing with garden hoses at the peak of summer.
She was squeaky clean when we finally left the shower, and then had a face covered in chocolate a minute later because she was just going to TRY the KitKat in the locker room when my back was turned. But on the drive back, she slept the sleep of an innocent who has just spent probably a bit too much time in water that was a bit too hot for her. When we got home, she housed an avocado and set herself up to play quietly with her PlayDough—zen on the inside and out.
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