(HOST) With Mother’s Day just around the corner, commentator Diana Whitney is contemplating the lives of celebrity moms.
(WHITNEY) Something compels me to brood over Angelina Jolie, vamping it up in a black strapless gown and enormous emerald earrings the size of her children’s thumbs. I can’t help staring at Heidi Klum, strutting her flawless bikini body six weeks after birthing her third.
I never used to care about celebrity moms. I disparaged the tabloid magazines, consumed in my own youthful dramas. But my voyeurism piqued after I delivered my first baby, my milk-brain so fuzzy I couldn’t even read a light novel.
Words swam before my sleepless eyes; ideas swirled and dissolved. All I could process were photos and gossip, so my husband brought me the magazines as a treat. I would devour them at night after a long, hot shower, while my fussy newborn slept her first brief stretch.
I followed the celebrity stories. I tracked Angelina through her pregnancies, her postpartum recoveries in Africa and Provence.
Reading the magazines, I existed in a fantasy world of glamour and skin and money.
Sometimes I’d imagine I was Gwyneth Paltrow on a macrobiotic power cleanse, with her nutritionist and personal chef and private Pilates instructors, her full-time nannies, her endless long legs in Chanel mini-dresses and 5-inch Manolo Blahnik stilettos. I’d work out for two hours on a special butt-minimizing machine, then head to the spa for eyebrow sculpting and a miracle plant-enzyme laser facial. Glowing with youth, I’d jet off to a premiere in Milan and a Vogue cover shoot, then check into a swank hotel with my rock star husband.
It helped that G-Pal (as the tabloids call her) and I are both 36 with two kids.
But when Gwyneth recently said that she works out hard, diets, and dresses up in hot clothes because "she doesn’t want to look like a mom who doesn’t care," I got upset.
What – pray tell – does such a mom look like, Gwyneth? Is she lugging her baby through the Vermont mud in ill-fitting jeans after no sleep, trying to keep herself together? Does she not have access to the childcare and teams of experts who help her sculpt her body and clad it in killer designer dresses?
I’m sorry, I shouldn’t get worked up like this. It’s my own fault for reading the darn magazines. But we crave the illusion they offer. We buy it, eat it up, then feel sick to our stomachs.
So I’m weaning myself off the tabloids. Some mom friends and I used to swap our well-worn mags, but we don’t anymore. Maybe our brains are getting sharper, now that we’re moving out of The Baby Cave. Or – maybe we don’t want our four-year-old daughters seeing all those pictures, and thinking that’s what real women look like.