No-Tox, Thanks

Ten days ago, as you may recall, Amicus had a large birthmark removed from his scalp. Yesterday we went to have the stitches out, and although on the day of the actual surgery we were in and out of the office within twenty minutes, this time we had to wait and wait and wait.

I had plenty of time to read several glossy magazines which I  would otherwise never pick up, and to observe the goings-on of the cosmetic-surgeon's office. Here are some things I noticed:

1. The average age of the population in the waiting room was roughly eighty, and most of them seemed to be somewhere in the process of having skin cancers removed from their faces.

2. The average age of the staff behind the reception desk was roughly twenty-two, though actually, on reflection, I don't know how I could tell for sure. They do the Botox thing, and the eyelash-enhancement thing, and the subtle-little-facelifty thing, and the eyebrow-shapery, and goodness knows what else in this office, as well as your basic skin-cancer removal and nevus-sebaceous-ectomy, and the longer I looked at the pert young receptionists, the more I began to wonder whether there was some kind of employee-discount business going on. They were all awfully sculpturally pretty.

3. There was a poster, with flyers, advertising a "Mommy Makeover" informational fair at which Doctor Perfect Hair was to speak on the subject of, um, things augmentational and reductionary, to help all us Mommies erase from our bodies any archeological-type evidence of our having gone through anything physical on the path to motherhood. The idea, I guess, is to emerge from these augmentational and reductionary procedures looking as if we got be Mommies simply by thinking of babies. Or as if the angels really did visit us and surprise us -- out of the blue! -- with little gurgling bundles.

Goodness! I think we're supposed to appear to have exclaimed, all wide-eyed like Barbie. Where did this come from? 

It occurs to me now that this represents a perfectly logical full-circle conclusion to the separation of sex from babies:  the separation of your body from any acknowledgment that it played a role in the generation of a person of, presumably, some significance to you. 


Goodness! Having babies is hard! 

Or maybe I'm just completely grouchy because I turn forty-five this week, and I feel sure that if Doctor Perfect Hair had gotten five minutes alone with me, he would have suggested, in the nicest way possible, that somebody as pretty as me was doing herself an injustice by not trying to be even prettier. You know, we all need to admit that sometimes we need help. That kind of thing. The imperative of the possible. The longer I sat in that doctor's office, the more I thought about it, and the more it made my skin crawl:  my highly-imperfect, saggy and stretch-marked forty-four-years-three hundred-fifty-nine-days-old skin, with which I was happy to escape.

PS:   Amicus is great. He managed to burst one stitch scratching his head, but the whole thing healed up fine. And Dr. Perfect Hair, bless his heart, did say that the birthmark was indeed a nevus sebaceous of Janysson's (or something like that -- see the link in the post I linked to at the top of this one for correct spelling and info), which absolutely needed to come out. So we're all very thankful that it's gone, and that the whole thing went as smoothly as it did.