There's a new "mother's little helper" in town, and it isn't drugs. Nope, it's surgery and lots of it, because those badges of motherhood have turned into badges of shame and if you're the one caught without a tummy tuck then you won't get invited to the party. That's right, everybody needs a "mommy makeover."
As much as I acknowledge my own struggles with body image and secretly want the $30,000 surgery trifecta of tummy tuck/lipo/breast lift, it peeves me no end that something as drastic as surgery, as this blatant non-acceptance of one's own body in whatever shape it happens to be in, has become so pervasive.
So it's not the fact that women are flocking to plastic surgeons in droves for this sort of thing (the rate rose 11% for women ages 20-29 from 2005-2006) that bothers me, it's the fact that now it's sort of expected. Sure, we may poke fun at the extremes taken by the Real Housewives of of Orange County, but at the same time we want to be them, want the sort of surface perfection we see in them.
Oh, and here's the other thing that irks me. Its not only for themselves that women are willingly going under the knife in multiple procedures to re-create their bodies as if to proclaim they never had kids, but they are doing it to please someone else: the husbands. In describing one woman's experience: 'As for her husband, that's a no-brainer. "He loves it."'
Would you consider having surgery to erase the toll of motherhood? Or have you already?
