I told my mom that my husband and I were in a car accident and instantly regretted doing so. It’s not like either of us had been hurt; I had nothing to hide on that front. It’s that we didn’t do what she would have done.
The accident was very minor. A car was emerging from a car park. It was turning right, and the driver didn’t look back over his left shoulder to see if the road was clear. As he barrelled toward us, my husband, at the wheel, thought quickly: he couldn’t swoop left because there was a barrier there, so he put the accelerator pedal to the metal instead. Because of the added speed, the impact was not, thankfully, where it could have been. My husband wasn’t injured. But the right side of our car, near the back, was.
We stopped and got out. The man who hit us was deeply apologetic. “I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault. I wasn’t looking,” he said over and over. We inspected the damage. There was a big scrape – hard to miss. My first thought was: Oh good, now the right side matches the left! Our drive is narrow, so every time I take my bike out, I get squeezed between the car and our stone border and inevitably scratch the left side of the car.
After a few minutes, I whispered to my husband: “Let it go.” I could see he’d already come to the same conclusion. The two men exchanged phone numbers and reg numbers, and then my husband said, as discussed, “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” The man – he was quite young and this was probably his first accident – looked visibly relieved. I felt like we’d done a little mitzvah.
My mother, listening, felt very differently. “Why didn’t you take his insurance information?”
“Meh, the car isn’t worth much. I wouldn’t have bothered with the insurance.”
“At least you could have asked for money!” “I wasn’t going to fix it.”
“But what’s wrong with asking for money? He doesn’t know you won’t fix it. He said he was at fault. Could you not have gotten £500 out of him?”
I shrugged. “For what?”
“For you! I don’t approve of you just letting it go,” she told me. “You should have taken something. It’s not right. It’s not right.”
Since she was already not approving my choices, I decided it was a good time to segue into my latest news. “I’m having another fat transfer,” I told her.
“What??? Why???” I knew when I asked for the second revision that nobody on Team Skinazi would support this decision. My breast surgeon, the one who did my bilateral mastectomy, hadn’t been wholly convinced of a fat transfer to smooth out the area and mitigate radiation damage the first time around – and felt vindicated when they only managed to suck out a few millilitres of fat to inject around my implants. It’s for that reason and the issue of time that my husband, I knew, would be opposed.
When I floated the idea by him, his first question was: “Is there a point?” His second was: “But WHEN?” Our lives are massively overscheduled. And obviously, my mother wouldn’t approve. She thinks it’s “just” cosmetic, and in this way, she’s like our orthodontist, who refused to put braces on my son for years, arguing that he didn’t need them for medical reasons. “The issues are just cosmetic! Do you really want to pay just to make his teeth look nice?” (Answer: yes! A thousand times yes!).
I told my mom I wanted to try one more time. The breast nurse told me it’s not uncommon for women to have these revision surgeries four or five times. I was willing to go for twice; that would be enough. “I don’t approve!” my mom replied.
“I know.”
“Did you speak to your sister about this? She’ll talk you out of it.”
“Nah, I’m good.”
“But I don’t like it.” “Listen, mom,” I said. “I get it. You know, sometimes, you ask for advice. Or you don’t ask, but you listen to suggestions with an open mind. Maybe you brainstorm or workshop or do some kind of collaborative thinking.” She was nodding furiously and started to affirm her approval of this behaviour, but, as with the decision not to ask for money from the guy who hit us, I wasn’t looking for approval. “This is not one of those times,” I concluded. “Sometimes people just make executive decisions.” And that’s what I’m doing.
