other people's children

hmmm. i can't be the only person who has ever stumbled over a photograph of a child who is clearly my children's half brother on the internet (etsy, of all places) and thought, with all due respect to his mother, that my two were actually much better looking and actually in my honest, totally unbiased opinion my kids are like something out of a burberry campaign, and then felt really bad, but i'm damned if i can find an appropriate forum.

my brain thusly marinated in evil superficiality and shock, i toyed, fleetingly, with the idea of encouraging (read: masterminding) p n'r's careers as child models, with a view to raising their university tuition fees (fine art and engineering, respectively, probably, hopefully) and improving everyone's lives a hundredfold with their winsomeness. of course, i swiftly dismissed the idea. for a start, the pair of them are wont to swan about looking almost unbearably beautiful... and then a camera is produced... at which point they both adopt the squint/ expand-mouth-laterally-to-extremities-of-jawline school of smiling. but more importantly, neither of them would really stand for it. unless you happen to be the progeny of a rockstar, or a once-in-a-generation kate moss type, modelling can reduce one's sense of self to nothing but a set of scrawled features on a piece of acetate- rather specifically what i do not wish for my children. so it'll be down the mine like the rest of us, then.

later, as if to compound my instincts, i watched a documentary on bbc3 entitled baby beauty queens, or something, about the inaugural miss mini miss uk beauty pageant for the terminally over glittered tween (i might have misremembered the actual title here) and was pretty much disturbed to bits. there was a lovely, intelligent, pretty child who had had cosmetic surgery at 7, whose mother would get cross if she chose to wear her glasses rather than contact lenses. there was another lovely, intelligent, pretty child whose mother had made her a believe-board with pictures of naomi campbell, pound signs and a chihauhau called gucci on it. of course, there was an adorable, ethereal and gracious sweetheart from a council estate (cue lingering shots of smashed windows and copious litter) who genuinely didn't feel that winning was important, and had a likeable, bright mother desperate to give her preemie princess something to believe in.

a twelve year old, 5'6", natural (read: suspiciously unglittery) beauty in a £3k frock took the crown. hell's teeth. apart from our preemie princess, who quietly got on with carving out a career in modelling, and good for her, there were tears, tiaras and tantrums abound. and that was just the mums. i am ever more grateful for my daughter's ambition to open a patisserie, and my son's ambition to try "all of the jobs, except magician". ("just because.")

sometimes i think i might not actually, technically, be the worst mother in the world, and i wonder why that is not more uplifting a thought.





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