There she is again, bringing the bagboys to their knees with her just-stepped-out-of-the-salon hair, her perfect figure and her rosy and well-behaved children. As she edges her health-food-filled shopping cart by you, you smell the faintest hint of expensive perfume in her wake. You look down morosely at your own baby-food-crusted T-shirt and think of the scent that was applied to your own neck earlier in the day: eau de spit-up.
You know her. You hate her. She’s a hot mom.
There was a time when hot moms were practically nonexistent, a time when childbirth offered a one-way ticket to the comfy land of Suburbans, sweat pants and scrunchies. That was before supermommies like Reese Witherspoon and Faith Hill came along, flaunting their postpartum perkiness on the covers of magazines and calling into question the reality moms had so carefully crafted for themselves over the years—that birthing babies leads irrevocably to flabby bellies and saggy boobs, and that nothing short of expensive and risky plastic surgery that can be done about it.
These days, being a hot mom is, well, hot—particularly here in Nashville, where all the wannabes and coulda-beens of the music industry just love to flaunt their fake boobs and Spanx-encased asses all over town. Most have long given up their dreams of country music divadom in favor of well-to-do husbands, 2.5 kids and houses in the suburbs, but the old habits of bingeing, purging and Jazzercise die hard. I’ve always imagined that the lives of local hot moms run a pretty similar course: days of peanut butter sandwiches and trips to the zoo, nights of backstabbing and bitchery in The Gulch.
So when I started getting emails from a woman I’ll call Angelina, inviting me to join up with her posse of hot mom friends, I was understandably leery. Angelina’s MySpace page was filled with pictures of her blonde, tanned self, surrounded by equally gorgeous gal-pals. Could I—pale, puffy and perpetually premenstrual—hold my own with this crowd, or would I be blackballed the moment they spotted my unpedicured toes? I wasn’t sure, but in the name of research, I vowed to give the hot moms a chance, agreeing to meet with Angelina and three of her friends for a Monday play date.
Despite a raging storm that made me look as if a bucket of water had been dumped over my head by the time I made it to Angelina’s house, the other moms who came that day were irritatingly fluffy and dry as they daintily made their way through her front door. Sighing, I asked Angelina for a pen and made a note on the back of a damp envelope that was serving as my reporter’s notebook: Hot moms don’t get wet.
“So,” I asked, once we’d gotten the introductory chitchat out of the way. “I guess it’s hard to be a hot mom, huh? I mean, you’re the ones the other moms love to hate.”
There was a long and uncomfortable pause before a woman I’ll call Britney finally responded. “Oh, I know,” she said with great sincerity. “I hate seeing those perfect women when I’m out shopping or something! They look fabulous and so do their kids. It’s annoying!” I stared at her, dumbstruck. Britney was stunning. Her daughter was stunning. What the hell was she talking about? Quickly, I wrote, Hot moms might be delusional, and turned to a stylish brunette named we’ll call Julia, who also happened to be a mother of twins.
“We just moved to Smyrna,” Julia confided, “and I’m having a rough time fitting in with the other moms there. At my new playgroup, no one will talk to me and I have no idea why.” I shook my head, hoping to appear sympathetic. A few minutes earlier, Julia had confided that while she was buying a date-night dress for herself not long ago, the saleslady asked if it was for prom. Didn’t she realize that hell hath no fury like a mom confronted by another mom with a teenager’s body?
After a few more awkward questions and answers, I put my envelope away. This interview was going nowhere. Not only were the moms so sugary sweet that I was having a hard time hating them, but they also seemed to think they were pretty ordinary looking. That’s when I discovered that the fabled Hot Moms Club exists only in the sense that no mom, regardless of her appearance, really feels qualified to be a member. She may look good, but she can always find someone out there who looks far, far better.
I left Angelina’s house that day vowing to think differently of the poor hot moms of Nashville, and I hope all of you do the same. Don’t hate them because they’re beautiful. Hate them because they’re beautiful and nice and at least one of them has a gigantic plasma monitor over her custom stone fireplace. That is truly unfair.
