Frankensitter

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Mick Jagger (tall and thin, a little disheveled and wearing dark shades indoors)...no, it's my daycare provider Julie!

When I picked darling C. up yesterday after not seeing Julie since Monday afternoon (no, I didn't just leave Clementine unsupervised in the basement with the raucous toddlers--the helpers were there), I couldn't help but notice her big dark sunglasses. Of course I asked about them, and after hedging the question a few times she finally copped to some surgery. Oh no, I said, are you OK? Yes, it was just cosmetic. And with that she lifted up her glasses and I wanted to scream in fear. Will you be getting a refund? I wanted to ask. What the hell happened? But it turns out it wasn't surgery gone wrong--that's how you look when you let someone slice your eyelids off and sew them back on so you can shave a few years off your looks.

So of course she's wearing glasses because someone who looks like one of the three blind mice is much more comforting to children than someone who looks like the victim of a henious attack. I keep wondering if the sunglasses have slipped yet, if a kid (maybe Sean, the trouble-maker of the group) has made a grab at them, if some child has been emotionally scarred for life at the sight of her mangled, buised eyes all in the name of beauty.

Why am I so weirded out by this? I think cosmetic surgery is pointless at best, vain at worst, but to each her own. She probably thinks my tattoos are weird as shit, so I'm not going to worry about what kind of message plastic surgery sends to her charges. I am curious, though, about why a home daycare provider and avid churchgoer (and a fairly youthful looking one at that)thought she needed an eye lift. I know some of her kids are getting married soon. Is this just a sick case of wanting to look good in the pictures? Or is this one of those you-don't-know-until-you-experience-it things like everything in motherhood has been so far? Before it happened to me, I was always curious and incredulous about things moms did and felt. Will I be bandaging up my latest tuck or lift and saying to the young girls in the grocery Oh, honey, you just don't know about these things until you're old, saggy and lamenting the passing of your youth like me?