Sometimes, my posts about irritation with modern society just write themselves, and this was definitely the case when I encountered this Newsweek article about a children’s book explaining plastic surgery. It’s called “My Beautiful Mommy,” and it kind of makes me want to vomit.

Ostensibly, the book is designed to be marketed to mothers who are considering plastic surgery and want to be able to explain what’s happening to their young children. I get that. I can imagine it would be weird when your parents undergo medical procedures and don’t explain it, and it can be scary, so being able to talk about it would probably be really beneficial for young children, taking the fear of the unknown out of the equation.

But has plastic surgery for mothers become so commonplace that we need a children’s book to explain it? The outrageometer says yes, because obviously mothers have gross, disgusting, nasty sagging tummies and breasts, and no one will ever love them unless they resort to dangerous invasive surgical procedures to make them smooth, firm, and tight again.

I’ve noticed that mothers seem to be in for it more and more these days. First, they’re expected to lose their baby weight post haste, because baby weight makes you FAT and no one wants to look at fat people, even if they did just grow a human being. And now, apparently, mothers are supposed to surgically correct the somewhat inevitable results of pregnancy, thereby even further disguising the evidence that they gave birth to children.

Now, I don’t have children, so maybe I’m missing something here, but I feel like parenthood is a source of pride and personal identity for many people. So why would you want to conceal the fact that you are a parent? And why would you want a partner who erases all evidence of having born children, despite the fact that the children are (presumably) still in your lives?

A friend of mine once told me that he always thinks that women who haven’t had children look incomplete or unfinished somehow. He didn’t mean it in an insulting way (really), and he made a valid point; hormonal changes during pregnancy do change your body in certain ways, and some of those changes endure. From an evolutionary standpoint, it would make sense to be attracted to women who exhibit characteristics associated with pregnancy, because it means that they are fertile, which makes it kind of doubly sad that mothers now apparently feel like they need to cover up the evidence when they have children.

I’m opposed to plastic surgery in general, except in the case of reconstructive surgery after serious injuries or accidents, or in the case of surgery to correct congenital birth defects which cause pain or extreme embarrassment, or hinder someone’s ability to live. By all means, fix cleft palates and give burn victims new skin, but why hack the bodies of healthy people to satisfy some insane beauty standard?

Not having been pregnant, I don’t know what it’s like to experience the physical and hormonal changes associated with pregnancy and its aftermath. And I can definitely understand a sense of frustration or unhappiness with one’s body after pregnancy, because it has undergone some major changes. But I feel like it’s something that people should ride out, rather than correcting surgically. I know lots of mothers with washboard abs and firm, high breasts who came by them naturally, illustrating that it is, in fact, possible to tone your body back into shape after pregnancy, if that’s what you want to do.

It makes me incredibly sad that our solution to the complex emotions which women experience after surgery is to sweep them under the rug, to hack their bodies apart so they look “normal again.” What kind of society do we live in?