Even as you read this, sweet little children across the country are carefully finishing the last, dear festive bits of the card, collage or tiny, clumsy sculpture that they have made to give to the temporary love of their young lives on Mother’s Day.
Children delight in this annual offering of potted violets or hand-decorated framed photos to “the best Mom” or “the world’s most beautiful mother.” It’s one of the perks of our job: However haggard we feel, our young children think we’re ravishing.
Alas, children’s adoring acceptance seems completely at odds with the anxiety and self-distaste seen in the ever-growing legions of mothers getting surgery to make themselves more appealing.
Ew, Mommy’s stomach didn’t bounce back after the children! Yuck, her jaw is getting saggy! Gross, she needs implants up top and maybe lipo for those hips!
And off mothers are going, by the thousands, to submit to the scalpel rather than go gently into that good middle age. Among Washington’s alpha mothers, they’re everywhere: sleek and ageless; not young, exactly, but brilliantly well-groomed, with wide, white smiles, and smooth, creaseless brows.
As a rule, these mothers look fabulous — though there’s undeniably a bit of Stepford in this purchased beauty that tends, so remorselessly, toward a bland female ideal.
But what do their poor children make of it? Seeing one’s mother bruised, drugged with painkillers and wrapped in gauze must be frightening. Light explanations of Mommy getting her nose “done” are troubling to small children who already believe their mothers are unimprovably lovely creatures.
How to help children overcome the cognitive dissonance? Apparently it’s a real problem.
Now, timed for Mother’s Day, comes a solution: “My Beautiful Mommy” (Big Tent Books), a new children’s book designed to demystify the alarming process by which a mother with a crooked nose, garden-variety breasts and wrinkled stomach skin becomes “not just different — prettier!”
I know. Ghastly. Yet cosmetic surgeon Dr. Michael Salzhauer says he wrote the book because he saw a genuine need for it among the children of his Florida clientele.
The story begins with a little girl accompanying her mother to a surgical consultation. “But you’re already the prettiest mother in the whole wide world!” the girl protests.
“That’s sweet of you to say,” the mother soothes, “but Mommy is also having her tummy made smaller. You see, as I got older, my body stretched and I couldn’t fit into my clothes anymore. Dr. Michael is going to help fix that and make me feel better.”
At this point, the sardonic reader wonders why Mommy doesn’t simply buy new clothes. But to be fair, “My Beautiful Mommy,” for all its garish illustration, is simply describing the puzzling reality that thousands of children experience.
A friend of mine in her late 40s (who, it must be said, is stunningly elegant) describes her own children’s reactions to her multiple cosmetic surgeries as “a mixture of concern and horrified fascination.”
She goes on: “Usually I just say the doctor fixed a problem with my scar/chin/saliva glands, or whatever. I keep it vague. They just want to be reassured that you are basically OK.”
Dr. Kim Daud Galli, a cosmetic surgeon in Washington, D.C., agrees a children’s book may help: “Even my daughters are confused about what I do. When I say I’ve fixed someone’s eyes, they’ll ask, “Wait, they were broken?”
When “My Beautiful Mommy” finally takes off her bandages, she is stacked, with a pert nose and taut tummy. “I feel much better now,” she tells her awestruck daughter.
Isn’t that great? Yet why stop there? Think of all the other bewildering maternal behaviors that could be explained to children.
For Mother’s Day next year, let’s hope some enterprising publisher will give us “My Mommy Has a Credit Limit,” or “Mommy’s ‘Special Friend,’ ” or maybe, “No, You Can’t Have Another Oreo. Pass Mommy Her Margarita.”
