Today is the calm before the storm - again - because tomorrow is D-Day: pack up The Teen for her month long pre-college program far away. It will be a mad dash of a day to Target, grocery store, a shoe store, the art store and packing, washing, ironing.
And since it may be the only day we spend together this summer until we go to the Cape, I am hoping for a mother daughter mani/pedi and quick zip into the city to our fave place for breakfast. Now that The Teen has a job, she's no longer our sweet companion on our weekend jaunts and I miss her.
Mother/daughter relationships: so fraught with tension, love, judgment, acceptance, miscommunication, joy, sorrow, tears, and laughter.
Whatever my faults as a mother and my daughters' frustrations with me, I know that they know they are loved and cherished and enjoyed. I know they are not perfect and they certainly know I am not.
And I never entered them in a beauty pageant.
Being rarely home during the day, I am unfamiliar with daytime TV choices. Feeling under the weather today, I came home early from work and just wanted to lie on my bed and veg out. Flipping around the channels, I stopped at "Little Miss Perfect". Thinking it was the movie, which I now realize is "Little Miss Sunshine", I discovered it was a reality TV show on child Beauty Queens. I watched the hour with my jaw hanging down like a mule on crack.
The first episode featured an absolutely darling, sweet, not overly made up but completely self-conscious little girl being made to wear a snake around her neck for a talent competition, and was then followed up by an hour long show where moms and daughters are competing together as beauty contestants.
I just don't know child beauty pageants still existed. For some reason, I thought they had been outlawed after the Jon Benet tragedy. Obviously I was talking through my hat since it appears it is alive and well and about as close to legalized child pornography and abuse as one can get without having Child Protective Services busting down your door.
Hair extensions, fake tans, acrylic nails, full make up, Dolly Parton look-alike hair styles, enough sequins to make Bob Mackie jealous, and the most revolting poses, dances, and sexual coquettishness to make Nabokov blush. Sad faces, robotic-like runway strutting, fake eyelashes, and the parents crying over having to tell their daughters that the "judges didn't think she was pretty enough" when she loses the competition.
AAARGH! The years of therapy! The self-worth issues! The food control, sexual acting out, drug abuse, wrapped tighter than a drum perfectionism.........
I don't which episode was worse: the one featuring little kids with the thousand-dollar dresses and Southern moms parading their kewpie doll daughters across runways while they wipe tears from their unmade up eyes. Maybe it was just this episode, but it seemed as though the more ornate and sexual the child's appearance and demeanor, the more plain and unkempt the mother's appearance.
Now I am now writing about good ol' soccer moms with mom jeans and Gap t-shirts; I am talking about women who look like they do not even pass a brush over their hair or look in a mirror in the course of a week, but slavishly fuss over every sequin, eyelash, and hair extension on their child. Moms who had black roots under the most bleached out hair and triple X bodies (in size not adult content) who were rubbing glue sticks on their daughter's chest because the little one didn't have an actual chest to keep their sexually precocious dress from falling down.
The next show featured mother and daughter competitions, with Dad's helping to choreograph dance routines using kitchen chairs and camo hats. (Every Dad featured had a mullet or a ponytail and some form of camo.) The children walked liked they were made of porcelain and their mouths were frozen in smiles. The moms were getting botox and squeezing into gowns they once wore 30 pounds and/or 30 years ago.
Hard to say which was more jaw-dropping or troubling, the intensity of the moms who had completely let their own self images plummet into the basement in order to micromanage every fake hair on their daughters' heads, or the moms getting their lips botoxed and squeezing themselves into gowns last worn 20 years/10 pounds ago.
At the risk of being tarred and feathered, I have to say that it brings up some of the most unpleasant aspects of living in the South - not that all these people were from the South, but it was a definite culture prevalent there at many levels and in many forms.
I know that this sounds like a very east coast putdown. And I am painfully aware that this beauty pageants are just a more disturbing level of the more popular culture of pressuring kids to compete in sports, academics, and college placements.
And while I want to grab some of my kids' friends and tell them to slow down and take a couple weeks off from the pre-college classes, college boards prep, volunteer activities, and athletic camps to just sit in the sun and throw each other in the pool, at least I have never had to shudder at hearing one of their moms tell them that when they are walking down the runway in front of the judges to be sure to put put "some brass in their ass".
