AT A restaurant last night, where I was celebrating Mother’s Day with my sisters and mother, I couldn’t help but make a few furtive observations of the people in the room. It’s bad to eavesdrop, but it’s also difficult to avert the eyes. The restaurant was filled with families, though I use the word in the postmodern sense. At the next table, there were two mothers, two sons, and no fathers. There were also two of the largest sets of artificial knockers I have ever seen in my life. One women had breast implants so commodious, the waitress could have rested two platters on top, and a wine bottle too. A corsage would have looked ludicrous on this woman, and on most of the women in the restaurant. The freshness and innocence of a single bloom – well, it just wouldn’t do.

I guess there are many parts of the world where the American woman is envied, poor and hardscrabble places where women own only two saris or cover their graying hair in scarves instead of highlights. But I’d rather look like Aunt Bea or a toothless Russian babushka than many an American woman today. Women seem to spend larger and larger sums of money on breast implants, tans, face lifts, hair cuts, hair coloring, hair highlights, make-up and clothes that make them look like street walkers or superannuated dolls.

Where is this money coming from? I thought women were so broke they “had to” work.

                                            — Comments —

Karen I. writes:

I recently read a very sad, very upsetting story about a botched abortion of a 22-week-old fetus in Italy. The poor baby survived and was left for dead until a priest went to pray over him and found him still alive about 24 hours later, alone in a pile of medical waste. He was taken to a NICU where he died the next day. The abortion was done because the baby was “defective”. The defect was a cleft palate and lip. What is wrong in this world that has caused women to seek perfection to the extent they will deform themselves to look “perfect” and abort babies that are less than “perfect”? 

The look you describe is high maintenance. It costs a fortune. It is not a motherly look and I think that is the point of it. There is now something called a “mommy makeover”, where three surgeries are done at once. It costs $30,000 and up and consists of breast implants, a “tummy tuck” and liposuction. The body is returned to it’s pre-pregnancy state. The purpose of a “mommy makeover” is to make a woman look less motherly. Diet and exercise can go a very long way towards getting one’s figure back after pregnancy, but that is not enough for some. What a sad commentary that is on our society’s values.

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