I promised myself I would give this up. I know it’s wrong, but she smelled of an odd mixture of conditioned leather and body butter. God that made me nauseous. And now I have to purge myself of this before I can move on.

I was in, of all places, Church. Supposedly praying. Supposedly refocusing my life. But instead of turning inward, I began to feel my stomach turning over. And that ring on her finger…

Her children were out of control and out of her range of vision. She looked outward for approval and they shot glances to see if they could get away with mischief. Her skin painfully bronzed, but perhaps I was the only one thinking it odd that her face was a few shades of orange darker than the rest of us. I guess the sun was shining on her house, and her house only for the past several months as the rest of us in the midwest palely await the first signs of spring.

Damnit, I didn’t want to stoop to this level. Forgive me.

Her interactions with her children were as superficial as her cheeks. I think she even wore a smaller pants size than her 9 year old daughter. As her 8 year old boy ripped half the hymnal page out to put his gum in it, she shot an, “oops, wasn’t that cute” nose-scrunch to the lady beside them. And then she took the opportunity to reposition her hair.

I tried. I tried to hide my eyes. To not look. To not be distracted by her and the little people that rode with her in her beamer SUV. But the smell. It was awful. Perfectly conditioned leather and aveda body butter clearly out-aroma’ed the rest of the cosmetics employed in this morning’s reconstruction. They were the winners, taking my senses and concentration by storm. Her purchased persona stole my Sunday morning, and now she was checking to see if my roomate was eyeing her.

But now I thank her. I took from this experience one golden nugget of truth that I was not privy to before she wafted into my life: If you decide to visit a doctor-friend to be, ahem, ‘enhanced,’ don’t go anywhere with the rest of your family. Ever. Because if you’re trying to change your appearance, you might not want the rest of us to see five other instances what you looked like originally.

And the faces of babes don’t lie.