Paris Jackson marked US Mother’s Day with a set of photos of herself and Debbie Rowe, pairing the images with a joke that landed with the sting and odd tenderness that has come to define their public relationship. She wrote: “Happy Mother’s Day to the lady they used for my template during the cloning process.”
Jackson has also been open about how much closer she and Rowe have become. On Willow Smith’s podcast, she said they “look exactly alike,” called Rowe her “rock,” and said the two now talk about the music they like, including country and folk. “It’s cool. I mean like, getting to know her, seeing how similar we are, getting into what kind of music she likes and she really likes country and folk,” Jackson said. “I send her some of the stuff that I’m working on that has banjos in them.”
The exchange matters now because it adds a public, personal layer to a relationship that has long been complicated by the Jackson family history. Rowe married Michael Jackson in a secret ceremony in Sydney, Australia, in 1996, the couple split four years later and divorced in 1999, with Rowe agreeing to Michael Jackson getting full custody of the children. Michael Jackson died at his home in Los Angeles in 2009.
For years, Rowe was said to have been sidelined during Paris Jackson’s early teenage years, but the two have recently been described as spending more time together and being closer than ever. Rowe’s return to public attention through the TMZ documentary Who Really Killed Michael Jackson also brought renewed scrutiny to the life she once kept largely out of view.
There is still friction beneath the affection. Jackson has said she was very young when the family arrangement around her early life was happening, and that she was “just going through the motions” without much guidance. In a separate reminder of the toll of that life, she revealed last year that years of drug abuse left a hole in her nose and said, “I have a really loud whistle because you can hear it when I breathe through my nose…”
Even so, the tone between mother and daughter now appears different from the distance that marked earlier years. Rowe was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016, and Jackson helped her through chemotherapy in 2017, a turn that seems to have deepened a bond neither of them could manufacture. On Mother’s Day, Jackson’s joke may have been sharp, but the message underneath it was not: she now speaks about Rowe less like a relic of the past than a friend she is still getting to know.
