Mamma Mia!

Reality to Earth . . . I Think the Mother of the Year Award is Sewn Up

At the start of any endeavor, it’s rare when we suddenly find ourselves standing at the top of a mountain looking down. It’s hard to imagine finding a place which crystallizes a purpose in one perfect jewel of an idea. It’s like starting a marathon one hundred feet from the finish line. It’s the feeling the character Max Bialystock in the movie “The Producers” has when he’s looking to find the worst play of all time and opens the first page of a disaster called “Springtime for Hitler.”

You want to see a full break with reality? I’m here to deliver a beauty for you, dear readers. I give you a San Francisco woman named Kerry C. and her eight year old daughter, Brittany.

Brittany is a lively looking, round faced little girl who’ll do anything mommy asks, happily involved in the wild, self-image warping world of child beauty pageants. (And yes, I’ll call them beauty pageants as I don’t want to waste a single iota of written sarcastic sentiment on the term ‘scholarship pageant’, especially in this case.)

Brittany will also lie down on a bed while mommy injects Botox into her face to keep her little dimpled face from showing wrinkles. That’s Botox . . . A muscle-paralyzing agent which is known popularly to be dispensed by plastic surgeons for wrinkles, but also has a series of beneficial uses including treatment of migraines, forms of muscle stiffness and axillary hyperhydrosis. That’s Botox . . . A derivative of botulinum toxin. (That’s the tox part, folks.)

Where do I start with this? Let’s go with the practical elements. First, if not particularly foremost, this is a prescription drug and the mother isn’t a medical professional . . . If she were; any state board in the country would yank her license for an act of this nature so fast they’d take half her arm with it. Second, in the interview which introduced me to this story, she’s visibly reluctant to supply information about who supplied her with the Botox, which screams procurement by illegal means, either on her part or that of her supplier; perhaps both. Third . . .

The HELL with it! She’s a PARENT introducing a TOXIN to the growing, mostly unformed body of an EIGHT YEAR OLD to prevent WRINKLES to win a CONTEST. Never mind the short term stupidity of the act itself; no one knows what this will do to the child in the long run . . . The mother doesn’t seem to care, she just wants her little Sardonicus* to have her face frozen wrinkle-free for pageant purposes. The professionals who use this on stuff on adults agree it shouldn’t be used on a minor. Read the label, which is available through the producer . . . As with most prescription medicines, this one comes with a list of warnings which would make most people seriously weigh the options.

The child, who shouldn’t be weighing the options required in making this kind of decision, informed, misinformed or otherwise, is dutifully doing as she’s told because she doesn’t “think wrinkles are nice on a little girl.”

That’s coming on a direct feed from the mother’s mouth, of course. At eight, even on the most precocious of children, opinions of this type have been shaped within the confines of the environments provided by the parents.** Without a load of therapy, I would bet this kid is going to have a fear of the natural aging process and self-image problems for the rest of her life, especially when her supply of face-freezing botulinum is taken from her which, as I write this, is a process which the city of San Francisco’s health services department is gearing up for.

Don’t spare the horses on a slam-dunk like this one, ladies and gents. From the horrific failures of varied child service agencies I’ve had to watch cross my newspapers and TV screens in the past forty or so years due to mishandled abuse cases, I’ll admit there were times when you weren’t my favorite people on the planet. I’M rooting for you, so that maybe in a few years; at least one child will still be able to smile as a result.



*Look up the image, ye of the strong-stomached. It was a nasty make-up job in a b-movie about a noble whose face froze in a death's-head when he grave-robbed a winning lottery ticket. Cheesy as it may have been, it made me jump as a kid.

** Take it from someone who’s been through the process twice. Once they take your base attempts at development at a young age and launch themselves whole cloth into independent thought later on, anything can happen. :)