The day after I delivered my twin daughters—each weighing seven pounds, six ounces—I was in my hospital bed, trying to withstand the post-surgical pain of a C-section, when a doctor from my OB/GYN practice came in to check on me. Wanting me to walk around, he and a nurse helped me out of the bed. I leaned against it as he opened my hospital gown to check my bandages and incision. Then, while handling my still-swollen belly and the fistfuls of sagging skin that had emerged after my full-term pregnancy, he said—surely aiming for humor—“Are those twins still in there?”
When he left, I burst into tears.
I am not naïve. Some new mothers might be blindsided by the cruelty of still looking pregnant after delivery, but I wasn’t a first-time mother. I had been through the mill, having given birth four years earlier to my son, Jack. But this time was different.
After I dried my tears, I thought back to a conversation I’d had with my obstetrician, Dr. David Hollander, a high-risk pregnancy specialist, a few weeks before my delivery. Lying on his examination table, nearly crushed by the forty pounds of weight erupting directly from my middle, I said, “I can’t believe my skin can stretch like this and still go back.
“It won’t,” he said, kindly but matter-of-factly. “Thin women usually don’t get their figures back after going full-term with multiples. The only way to get your skin and belly to go back is to have a tummy tuck.”
A tummy tuck is a painful operation with a difficult recovery, he added quickly—and not a procedure one undertakes while caring for a preschooler and infant twins. Although I had heard what Dr. Hollander told me, at the time I didn’t fully believe or worry about what he was saying. I had bounced back well enough after my first pregnancy. Plenty of women had twins and looked just fine after doing so.
But after Ava and Corinne were born, I experienced firsthand what my doctor had tried to prepare me for. I had never seen a belly like the one I was now seeing in the mirror. In addition to having a horizontal cesarean scar—which I expected and had no problem with—I had what looked like an inverted, vertical divide up my abdomen. From each side of that indentation hung crinkled, drooping skin. Below my now distorted belly button was a hunk of grabbable flesh. The midsection of my body had turned from that of a fit, 110-pound, thirty-seven-year-old into the figure of a woman more than twice my age (or weight).
Whenever I looked at my body in the days, weeks, months, and years after my daughters’ birth, I was confronted with the vision of my once-taut belly turned pendulous and wrinkled like an elephant’s knee. I couldn’t help but think I had sacrificed my sex appeal and youth to my amazingly robust baby girls.
I consoled myself with the fact that my husband wasn’t bothered by my new figure, and I made a deal with God that so long as I could hide the damage with clothing and support undergarments, I would accept my new belly. That proved to be both emotionally and stylistically challenging. My new figure made its debut at about the same time as the low-rise jeans craze, which infiltrated the wardrobes of women of all ages. For several years, I had a horrible time finding suitable pants with a high-enough waistband to contain my flab and hide the body-slimmer underpants I had to pull up beyond my belly button.
I could barely look at my damaged stomach. I didn’t want to reveal it to anyone else. While I tried not to obsess, it did make me feel sad and defeated that, unlike other women I knew, having children so drastically changed my body and with it, some of my self-esteem. I didn’t want to endure the pain or risk or cost of elective surgery. But in the back of my head I knew that, should anything ever happen to my marriage, a tummy tuck would be a necessity before I would have the confidence to date again.
Two years ago, at age forty-one, when my twins were four, my thinking changed. Why should marital misfortune be the only prerequisite to doing something positive for myself? Why spend the rest of my life with an eighty-year-old’s belly, when, with money and some time and discomfort, I could be rid of it.
I decided to just see what a plastic surgeon would say about my situation. I met with the top surgeon in a prominent cosmetic surgery practice near where I live in suburban Washington, D.C.
Yes, my condition could only be fixed with surgery, said the physician I’ll call Dr. Barry. He confirmed that because I’m small (barely five foot, two inches), my midsection had been stretched to the extreme in order to accommodate my full-term twins. My skin’s elasticity was shot. Internally, I had a vertical split in my abdominal musculature (diastasis recti), which meant I had an exceptionally wide gap where my muscles had once touched. Diet and exercise wouldn’t restore the skin’s tightness or reposition my spread muscles. An abdominoplasty—a surgical procedure that corrects a protruding or loose and sagging abdomen—would do the trick, though, he said.
Then the conversation took an unexpected turn—unexpected to me, at least. Dr. Barry asked if I had any interest in breast augmentation, in addition to the abdominoplasty. When I said I didn’t want implants, he noted that since my breasts were full, just fallen, I could have a lift without implants.
I was taken aback. I was okay with my breasts, I assured him. It was my belly I was upset about. He accepted that, yet went on to explain how I could use the opportunity presented by the tummy tuck to liposuction some excess flab from my flanks (those pesky “love handles”) and thighs (to remove my “saddlebags”). I’d already be paying for the anesthesia and operating room, Dr. Barry pointed out; the liposuction could be added at a reduced rate. I left the consultation feeling even more self-conscious about my body. I knew my belly was a mess, but I had no idea so much else was wrong with me.
It was only later that I realized what had happened in that room. It’s called “upselling”—using a customer’s desire for a particular product or service as a springboard to sell them more than what they came in for. I had gone in to inquire about a tummy tuck; Dr. Barry saw an opportunity to sell me a “Mom Job.” Also known as a “Mommy Makeover,” this three-part surgical package typically includes breast reshaping (implants and/or a breast lift), abdominoplasty, and liposuction (also called “body sculpting” or “body contouring”) to remove fat from thighs, waistline, and other trouble spots. The package features a discount and an enticing get-it-all-over-with-at-once opportunity.
It’s no surprise that Dr. Barry wanted to talk me into a Mom Job. Mom Jobism is big business. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), in 2006 more than 325,000 tummy tuck, breast augmentation, and breast lift procedures were performed on women ages twenty to thirty-nine. In 2007, more than $2.5 billion was spent by patients on those procedures. (At the same time, of the more than seventeen million procedures performed by plastic surgeons in the U.S. each year, only about two million of them are cosmetic, elective surgeries. The rest are non-invasive cosmetic procedures or medically necessary, reconstructive surgeries.) By working beyond the confines of the health insurance system, elective cosmetic surgery is essentially a cash business—one with free advertising provided by the media, the entertainment industry, and a celebrity-obsessed public.
The ASPS reports that the popularity of Mom Jobs, and cosmetic surgery in general, has exploded over the past two decades. Between 1992 and 2007 the number of tummy tucks increased 746 percent, and the number of breast augmentations grew 921 percent. (That figure is independent of breast reconstruction after mastectomy, which became a covered medical expense under legislation signed by President Clinton in 1998.) In the same time frame, liposuction increased 431 percent.
To keep the business growing, companies have sprouted up to help plastic surgeons market their services. From them, we can see the kinds of strategies—some would call them rationalizations—used to promote Mom Jobs.
“It is necessary in our society to feel good about one’s body,” claims the website of CosmeticSEO.com, an Atlanta, Georgia-based business offering cosmetic surgery marketing strategies to doctors. “The changes during pregnancy that take a toll on a women’s [sic] physical portrayal of herself need not affect her life and emotional well-being any longer. Women are entitled to look the way they did before pregnancy and you, as a cosmetic surgeon, need to educate your potential patients as much as possible on the steps to achieving a heightened sense of youthfulness and aesthetic beauty.”
Countless surgeons are doing just that.
“Many of today’s moms don’t feel they should sacrifice the way they look just because they’ve had children,” reads the website for Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery in Beverly Hills, which boasts that every tummy tuck comes with the “Rodeo Drive Belly Button,” described as a deeper, more natural-looking reconstructed belly button suitable for piercings and low-cut jeans.
Another website, promoting a practice based in California’s Orange County, says, “The idea of a mommy makeover is to allow a woman, whether she’s in her 20s, 30s or 40s to live like a mom without looking like her mother.” New York plastic surgeon Dr. Stephen T. Greenberg describes in detail what’s involved in the various procedures he offers, including the Mom Job package he’s dubbed the “Post Pregnancy Tune-Up.” For women who want to avoid the steep fees charged by U.S.-based, American Board of Plastic Surgery-certified cosmetic surgeons (usually about $10,000), companies such as Gorgeous Getaways offer “Yummy Mummy Post-Pregnancy Packages” to Malaysia and Sri Lanka starting at $6,435, including surgery and fourteen nights accommodation. (Childcare is available for an additional charge.)
The practice of reworking the post-partum body is not solely the business of cosmetic surgeons. Some OB/GYNS are offering cosmetic procedures, ranging from laser hair removal on the less invasive end of the scale, to far more intimate, elective surgeries such as so-called “vaginal rejuvenations” or “designer vaginoplasty” (to tighten the vagina and/or aesthetically redesign the labia), hymenoplasty (to restore a woman’s hymen and “virginity”) and “G-Spot Amplification” (to improve or enable orgasms). Last year, to temper the emerging trend, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACGO) issued a statement that elective, vaginal cosmetic procedures were rarely “medically indicated” and “the absence of data supporting the safety and efficacy of these procedures makes their recommendation untenable.”
While women who have post-pregnancy work done that’s visible to the casual observer (boob jobs, tummy tucks) tend to say they’ve undergone the procedure for their own self-confidence and sense of well-being, even the doctors who perform these more private operations (which, like other cosmetic procedures, are also marketed to women regardless of their childbearing status) observe that the motivations are often external. “The most common reason we hear [from patients] is that they have had a negative comment made by a male sexual partner,” said Dr. Pamela Loftus, a plastic surgeon specializing in vaginal cosmetic surgery, in a 2004 interview that appeared on Women’s eNews (womensenews.org). In the case of cosmetic labioplasty, the porn industry is often to blame. The website for renown gynecological surgeon Dr. David L. Matlock, of the Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute of Los Angeles, notes, “Many women bring us Playboy and say that they want to look like this.” (About such vaginal cosmetic surgeries, an ACGO spokesperson noted, “Many women don't realize that the appearance of external genitals varies significantly from woman to woman…. An honest discussion about the wide variation in the appearance of normal genitalia could reassure women who are insecure about the look of their own genitalia.”)
Phew. By walking through Dr. Barry’s door, I had unwittingly stumbled upon a growth industry centered on the post-pregnancy body.
Pregnancy and childbirth are natural and miraculous, but they are also naturally risky. Aside from the occasional horror stories of pregnancy or delivery complications, motherhood can cause chronic ailments that last beyond the immediate post-partum period. These include incontinence (urinary or fecal), painful varicose veins and hemorrhoids, hernias, third- and fourth-degree vaginal tearing, and pelvic prolapse, wherein the strain of pregnancy and especially a vaginal delivery can result in muscle damage that causes a woman’s uterus or bladder to drop. Such conditions often necessitate surgery.
Other tangible pregnancy aftereffects, such as sagging breasts, protruding bellies, separated abdominal muscles, and overstretched, pendulous skin are considered cosmetic rather than medical concerns. Yet, even though such aesthetic body changes rarely have a medical impact, the physical and emotional insecurities they cause are real. I felt my body had been uniquely and abnormally changed. I found myself returning again and again to the mirror, trying but failing to fully accept the post-pregnancy me.
The aesthetic consequences of pregnancy are frequently more pronounced today than a generation ago, in part because first-time mothers over age thirty-five are much more common. It’s typically harder for an older woman to bounce back after pregnancy than it is for a younger woman, who may be fitter, less tired, and whose skin retains more elasticity. In addition, the increased use of fertility treatments, combined with advanced maternal age, has caused the rate of multiple gestations to shoot up. (According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of twins born for every one thousand births increased seventy percent between 1980 and 2004.) Multiple gestations take a greater toll on a woman’s body than singletons do. All these variables, plus the fact that babies are born bigger these days, on average, contribute to the likelihood that mothers’ bodies are being stretched more than they used to be. (Despite the belief of many mothers, breastfeeding is not the leading reason for deflated breasts. In a 2007 statement, the ASPS noted that a woman’s body mass index, the number of pregnancies, age, smoking history, and a larger pre-pregnancy bra size were more significant risk factors for increased breast sagging.)
In the past, for a woman whose body didn’t bounce back after pregnancy, the traditional options were to do as her foremothers did and let the drooping parts droop or secure them with a girdle or corset. Today, modern medicine provides more options.
Cosmetic surgery as a recognized medical specialty dates to the 1930s, with the creation of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Its focus was to treat injuries caused by disease, congenital conditions, and disfiguring events (fires, accidents, war injuries). The field has expanded to include the kind of elective procedures that enhance or augment appearance. These days, many of the field’s practitioners are kept busy and rich by meeting and feeding the demand for elective cosmetic surgery.
This divide—between medical necessity and elective procedure—has defined the field of plastic surgery for a long time. And for just as long, our culture has assigned different values to each side. Medically indicated cosmetic procedures are accepted and approved. Some, as in the case of children born with cleft palates, are even underwritten by charity. Elective cosmetic surgery, on the other hand, is more often looked at as an expensive exercise in vanity, a way for those with too much money to remake themselves in the image of movie stars.
Where does that leave a woman like me, a forty-something stay-at-home mother of three, unhappy with what a routine life event has done to her figure? If I decided to go for a tummy tuck, was I giving in to vanity? Or is it possible that those proponents of surgery are right, that I deserve to regain my self-esteem by repairing my waistline?
Knowing that diet and exercise would do nothing to improve my belly, I began to seek out information from women I knew who had—or whom I suspected had—post-pregnancy cosmetic surgery. I was especially fascinated by moms of multiples and those who had had many children and still looked fit. Had they undergone surgery? Or were they, like me, stuffing themselves into body shapers and support underwear made from smoothing, binding Lycra?
Nora, a neighbor about my size whose second pregnancy produced twins, confessed she’d had a tummy tuck and provided me with helpful information about the procedure and recovery. Ginny, another neighbor, explained how, after a 100-pound weight gain and loss with her fourth child, she grew increasingly disgusted and depressed over the way her sagging belly skin got caught in her pants’ zipper.
I found that women I didn’t even know particularly well were willing to share the secrets of their post-partum shape shifting if I opened the door to the conversation. While sitting at my son’s soccer game, I struck up a conversation with a woman named Erin, whom I knew had eighteen-year-old triplets and ten-year-old twins. Today, at forty-four, Erin has the thin physique of the marathon runner she is. When I commented on her amazing shape in light of her exceptional pregnancies, she came right out and revealed that her flat belly was the result of the fortuitous abdominoplasty she’d undergone three years earlier. While she had often wondered about having a tummy tuck, she felt cosmetic surgery wasn’t a practical option for a stay-at-home mother of five. During a routine physical, however, she was told that, in addition to an already-diagnosed diastasis recti, she had a major hernia in need of surgical repair. The benefit of the diagnosis: During the operation to repair the hernia—a medical necessity—Erin could have a plastic surgeon repair the diastasis and remove her pendulous excess skin. The hernia portion of the operation was covered by insurance. Erin paid out of pocket for the tummy tuck. She was lucky, in a way; the cosmetic surgery was an added bonus to fixing her medical problem.
Other women I spoke with were similarly upfront about their post-pregnancy fixes.
After five years of pregnancy and nursing, a thirty-eight-year-old New Jersey personal trainer and mother of two I’ll call Colleen says her breasts had become like two drooping letter Ls. “I’m petite,” she says. “I’m fit, I exercise, but exercise wouldn’t fix what happened to my breasts. I wasn’t feeling like me anymore. I started to focus on it so much I was obsessing.”
Colleen asked that her real name not be used for this article in deference to her husband. He wasn’t thrilled about the breast augmentation she underwent last April.
“He was afraid of me dying while having elective surgery,” Colleen says. “My response to that was, statistically, it’s more dangerous for me to take the kids to preschool every day. I had more faith in my surgeon than I do in other drivers.”
She rationalized the expense of the surgery by comparing it to other types of consumer goods.
“I look at it this way. If you bought a car and installed $10,000 worth of upgrades—like an entertainment system, GPS, leather seats, and so on—you would likely enjoy those upgrades during the times you happen to be in the car,” she says. “In a few years, the value of your car would have depreciated, and you may even have traded it in for another. I used that same $10,000 for a breast augmentation, and I appreciate my $10,000 investment every minute of every day.”
Paula, forty-one, a business administrator who lives in Katy, Texas, raves about her “I Can’t Believe You’re a Mom!” makeover, so named and performed by Houston surgeon Dr. R. Lee Steely. After two cesareans, nearly two years of breastfeeding, and major abdominal surgery to remove a football-sized fibroid a month after her first C-section, Paula says she grew increasingly depressed and self-conscious about her drooping belly and breasts.
“I had always been in shape, but what happened to my body after having babies made me very sad. I had a really hard time with it, and with finding clothes that fit,” she says. The all-at-once makeover, which cost her about $14,000, involved a tummy tuck, breast augmentation, and liposuction throughout her midsection.
“Physically, I look better than I ever did,” says Paula, a year after the surgery. “I’m emotionally better off, too.”
Susan, forty-three, a stay-at-home mother of two in California’s Silicon Valley, is seriously considering having a breast lift, and perhaps an augmentation, to restore her cleavage. “It’s not that I’m not happy with the size. I’m not happy with the hang,” she explains. “Hopefully when I’m sixty I won’t care, but right now I don’t know if I want to go through the next twenty years not being happy with the way I look.” The fact that insurance doesn’t cover post-pregnancy repairs bothers her: “When the problem is a droopy erection, it’s covered,” she points out.
There is no shortage of social critics who decry the rise of Mom Jobs. In general, they ascribe the growth of its popularity less to the increased physical toll that pregnancy and childbirth take on the bodies of older mothers and more on our culture’s fixation with appearance.
This fixation is fairly new, says Tina Cassidy, author of the 2006 book Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born. “Just as the pregnant body was once not shown—that’s why they called pregnancy ‘confinement’—the post-pregnancy body never existed before because no one ever saw it,” she says.
In many ways, the modern obsession with mothers’ bodies began seventeen years ago, in 1991, when actress Demi Moore bared her naked, seven-months-pregnant self on the cover of Vanity Fair. For many people, it was the first time they had really seen a pregnant body. (And either through airbrushing or good genes, Moore’s expectant body was tan and taut and free of the dark linea nigra that marks many a pregnant belly.)
More recently, celebrity magazines have fixated on the “baby bumps” of stars, including Jennifer Lopez, Angelina Jolie, and Nicole Kidman, and others. The same fascination is then turned to those stars’ fabulous post-pregnancy figures. Supermodel Heidi Klum appeared at an awards show looking thin and fit six days after giving birth to her second child. Actress Denise Richards posed nude in Playboy five months after the birth of her firstborn.
According to Rita Freedman, Ph.D., a Harrison, New York-based clinical psychologist specializing in body image and author of Bodylove: Learning to Like Our Looks and Ourselves (2002), “When a mom was strictly a mom, her maternal-looking body was more appropriate. When a mom is a single woman, or she is going into the boardroom every day, she has a different sense of self and her body image is influenced by the complexities of the roles she plays.
“Post-partum cosmetic surgery is an extension of the commercialization of women’s bodies,” continues Freedman, who sees the practice as part of “the infantalization of women’s beauty”—the cultural preference for women to have hairless bodies, pouting lips, and smooth skin like an infant’s.
“The post-partum woman is expected to go back, immediately, to what she was before,” Freedman observes. “And people have a naïve view that they can and should make themselves into whatever image is being sold to them at the moment, without regard to how genetics and hormones drive a lot of this, that fat has an important role to play in maternity, that our body parts have multiple roles.”
Considering our culture’s fixation on women’s breasts. “Tits are really for tots,” says Freedman bluntly. “But we don’t think of them that way. We think of breasts as being for men.”
She also sees the marketing and increase of post-pregnancy cosmetic surgery as pathologizing the post-pregnancy body into something that’s flawed or needs to be cured. “It’s unconscionable,” says Freedman. “But, for women, it takes a certain amount of radical feminism to question the procedure and the influence of friends and others who are having them.”
To be fair, not all cosmetic surgeons are focused on the upsell, by any means. Shortly after my first cosmetic surgery consultation, I met with another surgeon.
Dr. Kelly Sullivan confirmed my abdominal damage, and she described how surgery could repair the appearance of my midsection while restoring the muscular integrity of my abdomen. I would no longer feel as though my belly was flopping forward due to a lack of support.
“What about my thighs, and my waist and my boobs?” I asked.
“What about them?” she said.
What was striking to me about my two surgical consultations was that the second doctor focused on repairing the damage caused by my atypical pregnancy. If I had come to Dr. Sullivan (whose practice is divided equally between reconstructive and cosmetic surgery) and asked for a boob job and liposuction along with a tummy tuck, she would likely have performed those surgeries as well. (She does turn away some patients, she says. “I’ve often had the conversation where I say, ‘I don’t see what you’re talking about. I don’t see the extra skin, I don’t see the fat, and if I can’t see it, I can’t do anything to fix it.’”)
Regarding upselling in her profession, Sullivan says, “To have someone tell you that you need this and that, it’s just rude. Occasionally, a patient will come in and say, ‘What do you think I need?’ I’ll say, ‘I can’t tell you what you need. You don’t need anything.’ Instead, I start the conversation by saying, ‘What are you interested in learning about?’”
Dr. Cristina Hamill, an OB/GYN I’m friendly with, told me that as a medical professional and a woman, she has mixed feelings about post-pregnancy cosmetic surgery procedures. But even she admits that after the birth of her second child she entertained the idea of having a tummy tuck.
“I have a pooch. It’s little, but I can grab it. Most women have it,” she says. She ultimately chose to leave well enough alone. “As a physician, I found it very hard to justify cutting into a perfectly healthy body. I know, more than the average person, that there’s a risk involved.
“The other thing I really thought about was, ‘What kind of message is this sending to my daughter and my son?’ I look fine. I’m perfectly healthy. I don’t have pendulous skin or something obviously noticeable or challenging, such as patients I’ve had where one breast has become markedly larger than the other, causing different cup sizes.”
While Hamill is generally opposed to surgery for purely cosmetic reasons, she adds, “If I ever had something where they are cutting into me there anyway, I have to say I might revisit that decision.”
Just as women have a variety of pregnancy and delivery experiences (some breeze through the process, others truly struggle), the physical and emotional aftereffects of both run the gamut as well. Some women want to fix extreme damage that made their bodies age beyond their years. Others, focused on minor imperfections or body changes, want to turn back the clock to a younger place and time and, as Hamill points out, keep having more and more procedures. “It can be hard to find people who are perfectly, absolutely emotionally healthy who are having elective surgeries,” she says. “Sometimes it seems as though there’s a hole they’re trying to fix with a procedure.”
Freedman notes that while many women say they are having cosmetic surgery for themselves, no one makes the decision entirely for herself. “The relationship that we have with ourselves is very strongly influenced by the woman down the block, by our loved ones, by the media, by the images we adopt from role models,” she says.
Many women who do undergo post-partum cosmetic procedures (including those interviewed for this article) tend to have one thing in common, say the experts I spoke with: Prior to pregnancy, these women were either satisfied or downright proud of their figures. Psychologist Rita Freedman and surgeon Kelly Sullivan have both observed that the changes caused by pregnancy are often harder for the woman who once had a thin or fit figure to accept than for those who were and continue to be larger or out-of-shape. The difference in attitude is affected by a woman’s “degree of appearance investment,” says Freedman. “What was the relationship of a woman to her body before the pregnancy? If there was a very high appearance investment, the change is more threatening.”
When I looked at my own wrinkled and drooping stomach, I didn’t care about the larger sociological assessment and debate about women’s bodies. All I cared about was that I hated looking at myself in the mirror, it was hard to find clothing that fit, and I barely wanted my husband to see my body.
One night, while flipping channels, I found great comfort in a TLC reality show called Jon & Kate Plus Eight. On the episode I tuned into, Kate, a mother of twins and sextuplets, explained that she is constantly asked about the appearance of her belly. On camera, she lifted her shirt, pulled down the elastic band of her waist-high support underwear and revealed a flabby belly that looked exactly like mine. I had never one before. With that peek at Kate’s belly, I felt less alone. (Kate later got a tummy tuck, courtesy of a viewer who donated the surgery.)
At the time, had I bothered to do a little digging on the Internet, I would have found that the mothers’ blogosphere was filled with women who were as obsessed and distraught about their post-pregnancy bellies as I was. If I had logged onto The Shape of a Mother (theshapeofamother.com), a website created by a woman identified only as Bonnie, I would have seen photographs of women who, like me, could hold a pencil beneath the flab of their floppy bellies. (The “pencil test” can be done with breasts as well.) I would have read Bonnie’s description of how she had caught a glimpse of a new mother who, “although she was at a healthy weight and her body was fit, she had that same extra skin hanging around her belly that I do. It occurred to me that a post-pregnancy body is one of this society's greatest secrets; all we see of the female body is that which is airbrushed and perfect, and if we look any different, we hide it from the light of day in fear of being seen.”
Bonnie created her website so women can share images of their postpartum bodies. “I think it would be nothing short of amazing if a few of our hearts are healed, or if we begin to cherish our new bodies which have done so much for the human race,” she writes. “What if the next generation grows up knowing how normal our bodies are?”
Does a site like The Shape of a Mother help or hinder women’s body image? Despite the possible unintended consequences—women so bothered by what they see that they forgo having children or diet while pregnant—I think for the most part seeing real bodies helps us accept (or at least understand) our real bodies.
After much consideration, I went ahead with the tummy tuck. I was well cared for by Dr. Sullivan, who fixed a three-inch gap in my abdominal musculature and removed the excess flab and skin. While the recovery was hard—and gross, since I came home with drains my husband or I had to empty of blood—it was much easier than my C-section recoveries. Back then, I had major surgery and was expected to care for one or more new babies. This time around, I got to take pain pills, lie in bed for more than a week and exempt myself from any lifting or twisting for weeks beyond that. Frankly, my post-op was like a mini-vacation.
While my new belly is nice, it’s not six-pack-abs amazing. It’s essentially the belly I would have had if a twin pregnancy hadn’t stretched me beyond my skin’s retractability. I feel my body looks good for my age, despite my drooping breasts, love handles and saddlebags, all of which remain with me.
While considering whether or not to have a full Mommy Makeover, or even just the tummy and liposuction part, I really looked at my changed body, which for years I had shied from seeing. I wondered at what point one generation cedes youth to the next, and I came to realize and accept that I’m now of an age when it’s more important for my body to be healthy than fashionable. I’ve also come to realize and accept that as a mother and mentor, my current responsibility is to build the self-esteem and self-worth of women and girls younger, and likely fitter, than myself.
I’m comfortable with having taken the middle road. The impressionable part of me agreed that, yes, a flat, strong belly is better than a flapping one, and I had my flab fixed. Physically, I feel enormously better. The confident, feminist (and, frankly, frugal) side of me said no to the marketing efforts that tried to sell me the perfect body I never had.
But what about the women who go in for the whole Mom Job? Are they truly being driven by their own happiness? Or are they being sold a bill of goods by our culture? Why aren’t women proud to have bodies that show they’ve had children? Why can men age and get fat and not have to think about having their changed bodies surgically repaired? Where do we as women draw the line between improving our self-esteem and feeling compelled to live up to an unrealistic ideal of how modern mothers should look?
“Women are acculturated from the time we are very young that sexuality and attracting partners is what our bodies are for, but that’s only the first step in what nature intended,” notes Freedman. “The final product is supposed to be maternity. But the term matronly is often pejorative. We don’t want to look matronly.”
As author Tina Cassidy observes, “Birth is always a reflection of the time and place where it happens. Birth today has become so highly technical, which reflects on our culture being all about medicine and technology, an artificial means to an end. That’s now completely applicable to the post-partum period as well.”
Before I had my tummy tuck two years ago, I didn’t let anyone other than my husband and mother see what my post-pregnancy belly looked like, and I told only my closest friends and family about why I was having surgery. I was embarrassed by what my twin pregnancy had done to my body, and also about indulging in costly elective surgery. Now, I have no qualms about admitting to what happened to my body after giving birth to healthy twins, and I will gladly discuss the surgical repair I had done and why. I will show my “before pictures” and reveal the after results (scars and all) if someone asks. I think it’s important for women to be honest with one another, and helpful to one another, about the life changes many of us have experienced or someday may.
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