The Reluctant Daddy

(Continued from NEEDLE EXCHANGE PT. 2)

My mother has a rather curious relationship with her plastic surgeon, Dr. Yi.

While trivial matters such as her only son’s emotional welfare or physical well-being may be one giant snooze fest, she can wax poetic for hours when talking about the most effective facial fillers, tightest brow lifts, or most ‘natural’ looking tummy tucks.  Like boring straight dudes, who in a locker room babble incessantly about a basketball or hockey, my mother speaks of plastic surgery like a much-loved, much favored national pastime. Unlike those dreary Orange County, Atlanta, or New York housewives or ‘mature’ Hollywood actresses that go to great lengths to hide their surgical ‘enhancements’, my mother wears each face lift, eye job, and laser treatment as a literal badge of honor.  In fact, were you to take a visual inventory of my mother’s eerily youthful face and body, not only would she not be inhibited by your comments or questions, but like a returning war veteran, would show you every scar received, every line smoothed out, in addition to every bit of sagging flesh that had been cut, snipped and cauterized.  As a matter of fact, Lloyd’s of London recently valued my mother’s head at $250,000 alone!

As my mother, my son Ethan, and I sat in Dr. Yi’s spotless Encino offices, I fidgeted uncomfortably in my seat while watching an elderly woman apply powder blue ice packs to her now frighteningly swollen, bee-sting lips. My son Ethan took little notice of the bee sting lady as he was now happily immersed in some ultra violent iphone game. My mother however, who’d just finished devouring the contents of a pamphlet extolling the joys of vaginal rejuvenation, smiled congenially at bee sting lady and quietly whispered in my ear that my own lips were looking a little ‘malnourished’ and could stand a little plumping. As our names were called by Dr. Yi’s menacingly amiable nurse, I began to mentally debate the merits of resolving my son’s needle phobia by taking him on this demented field trip to my mother’s plastic surgeon.

As we neared the operating theater, I began to panic and impetuously grabbed Ethan by the collar in an attempt to escape. Ethan and I slowly backtracked down the hall, but found our desertion suddenly thwarted by a bemused Dr. Yi, who while taking my trembling hand, looked deeply into my terrified eyes and said soothingly, “Leaving so soon? ”

(To be continued)