What Happens When Makeover Moms Hatch Ugly Ducklings?

At the best of times, the relationship between mother and daughter is complicated. From the rivalry for daddy's love, to the push and pull through adolescence and beyond, mothers and daughters must ride the twists and turns of the baggage carousel together for better or worse.

But the traditional flash points between mother and daughter could be augmented by something much more incendiary. The jealousy sagging moms feel about their perky progeny may seem positively outmoded. For as cosmetic surgery becomes less about aging and more about perfection, the next generation of mothers may find themselves opening a huge new can of worms. What happens when these engineered women give birth to daughters who possess all the physical flaws they spent thousands to erase?

Not anti-age, anti-ugly
A growing number of women are choosing cosmetic surgery to perfect their features, rather than simply combat aging. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, breast augmentation, nose-reshaping and liposuction were the top three surgical procedures in 2006, and breast augmentation popped out as number one for the first time since the ASPS began collecting statistics in 1992. Although it could be argued that face-lifts have fallen out of the top five because many non-surgical options abound, enough visual evidence exists (at least in the mall where I shop) to indicate more and more younger women are modifying their features to pick up where genetics left off.

Wanting to be better - and in particular, wanting to be better than mommy are both part of our intrinsic natures, at least where Freud is concerned. Oedipus isn't just for the boys. According to Dr Meredith Jones, writing in "Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies," "For women, the Oedipal complex can be used to describe conditions where we compete with, undermine, or hurt each other in order to 'grow' within a patriarchal system. This is a system where '[t]he bond between mother and daughter, daughter and mother, must be broken so that the daughter can become woman.'"

Staying out too late, dating the wrong guy, wearing skirts too short - these little rebellions are all part of the same issue. The difference is that mascara washes out the next morning. Breast implants don't.

And therein lies my concern.

Emotional tattoos
Plastic surgery allows us to permanently alter our appearance. It's not changing hair color, or getting a perm, it's changing your face or your body. Cosmetic surgery yields fundamental differences in appearance that appear to change your genetics, if only skin deep. But your kids don't know that.

Adopted children come to understand why they look different than their adopted parents. But what about the children who don't look anything like their birth parents? Little girls with big noses or teen girls with bee-sting boobs and voluptuous moms?

I'm sure Angelina Jolie will sit down with little Zahara one day and tell her why she looks different. But if Victoria Beckham ever has a daughter, do you think Posh will tell her, "You need big boobs and big lips to make it in this world" or "I had a body just like yours when I was a little girl, but I paid thousands to get rid of it." Now THAT'S mother-daughter love. Maybe that's why she's only had sons so far...

Some girls grow up feeling as though they can never live up to their mothers in terms of accomplishments, happy marriages or devoted mothering. Now add one more thing to the list. How can they learn to love themselves when they possess features their own mothers wanted to disown?

The first love relationship any of us have is with our mothers. As daughters we crave our mothers' love, but also acceptance and approval.

"As our primary role models, our mothers shape much of who we are as women. From our mothers, we learn how to be women, how to be in relationships and how to mother," says San Francisco psychologist Brenda Wade, PhD.

As little girls growing up, we watch our mothers intently, and pick and choose the qualities we revere or loathe. My mother was always petite and trim (I loved that). But she smoked (loathed it). She tirelessly made me bologna, cheese or PB&J sandwiches for my plaid lunchbox, precision-wrapped in waxed paper (loved it). But there was only ever one correct opinion: hers (loathed that, of course).

She also decided for both of us that, being short "we" could never be sexy. "We" could only be cute. It was decades later before I realized a majority of my behavior from adolescence onwards was based on trying to disprove that. Plastic surgery or no, my mother had no shortage of baggage to pass on to me.

Of course I wanted to be different than my mother. That's all part of growing up too. No matter what my mother wanted for me, how she looked or how she lived her life, it's not particularly shocking that I should have wanted something different. Emulation and rebellion somehow coexist.

iPod? Nosejob? What's the difference?
One area where I am certainly different than my mother is in my adoption of technology. I warmly embrace new technology in every category. Not just electronics, but household products, cosmetics, kitchenware. If I had children, I would happily pass on this enthusiasm. Why suffer chopping onions when you can use a state-of-the-art processor? Why have clogged pores when even the supermarket carries nose strips! So why live life with an ugly nose when you can have a pretty one custom-sculpted right on your face? It's just another mainstream technology, right? I guess so...

As Meredith Jones says, "Cosmetic surgery (is) part of a suite of body technologies and lifestyle practices." Think of it like hot yoga, or high colonics. And perhaps, like smoking, and poodle perms, plastic surgery will fall out of fashion as well. There may already be a backlash in the works.

British actress, Kate Beckinsale, says she is raising her daughter to despise plastic surgery. The actress, who was gorgeous at birth, told Glamour magazine she wants to expose her eight-year-old daughter Lily to the reality of plastic surgery at a young age because she thinks women who undergo the cosmetic procedure look like "monsters." Beckinsale also believes the Hollywood ideal is unachievable.

"I don't think you can aspire to it, nor can I. Everybody is retouched, stretched, lengthened, slimmed and trimmed. I could look at a picture of myself from the past and think, 'Why don't I look like that now?' It's because I never have!"

My mother wore padded bras and girdles when I was growing up. There she was, trying to tame the very same body shape I was helplessly growing into. Did it scar me for life? Probably not.

If internal conflict, depression and anxiety drive you to plastic surgery, no amount of procedures will fix it. For women who carried around all that junk before they had their boobs done, chances are they'll still have it after motherhood, and figure out a way to pass it on. We will ALWAYS find reasons to blame our parents for our unhappiness. Most definitely, "it's all because my mom had lipo" should not make it to the top of the list.


Michele Hickford is a freelance writer with an opinion on almost everything. Her first book, "Do I Need To Slap You?" www.doineedtoslapyou.com is available on Amazon.