Post-baby body: what your belly button says about you..

How bad does it have to get..

Your F**king belly button for F*cksake..

I get really pissed when women really take offense to a natural and ordinary response of the human body and then determine it to be flawed..

Ask any male the following question..

How does my belly button look ?
How does my boobs look ?
How does my body look ?
Does my arse look big in this dress ?
Are my boobs too big ?
Do you think my body is too skinny ?

F*ck me. I do not even have to tell the response from any male as it's so obvious but you have to deal with the response from your own insecurity and other members of your own sex..

Men do not give a shit about those irrelevant issues..

We DO NOT GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THAT..You are what you are..

Get over it..

Post-baby body: what your belly button says about you

You can always tell a woman who’s had a baby from one who hasn’t, a surgeon was once quoted in an article I read. Her belly button goes from an upright vertical like a keyhole to a horizontal shape, like, say, a prone drunkard (that last part of the description is mine).

While it may be true, there’s something unsettling about the focus on the appearance of post-baby bellies that stretches across our culture like a Lycra pregnancy top. Naturally there is the onslaught of celebrity pictures accompanied by copy that swoons over how AMAZING and GORGEOUS they look now that it appears they never had a child at all.

And recently the mummy tummy tuck – like Botox, lipo and injectables – has trickled down to the masses, wherein it’s considered an acceptable expense, in order to “get back to where you were.”

I didn’t feel like myself anymore, writes one woman in Saturday’s Weekend section, about getting an “apron” of excess tissue cut off and a new tummy button fashioned. In certain cases (like hers) pregnancy-related hernias make this type of operation not simply cosmetic.

It’s supposed to be empowering to say a woman’s post-baby tummy tuck is a personal decision, a choice she makes for herself that makes her feel good. Except it weaves itself into a larger picture of motherhood and body image. It ignores the factors that make a squishy tummy on your family beach holiday not part of life’s rich tapestry but a bit of window dressing that needs taking in. What we are supposed to be, after having one, two, five kids, is as slim as svelte as our 21-year-old selves.

There is also the danger. As the death of ex-footballer Colin Hendrie's wife from post-baby liposuction shows, things can and do go disastrously wrong during cosmetic surgery.

These days getting a nose job to “correct” the appearance of a wide Black nose or a prominent Jewish one is considered retrograde, almost self-loathin. Yet “correcting” a post-baby belly is not only accepted, it’s becoming more and more fashionable. Along the way, it has become normalised, rejecting and distorting the natural female body, even an gym-honed one.

There’s little acceptance that when your tummy is out to “there” for more than nine months, it’s going to have some effect on your body (even 40something childless friends report suddenly developing a belly where there wasn’t one before. It’s called getting older).

It’s all well and good saying, hey if it makes her feel better, go for it. But that really acquiesces to an attitude that is a lot more damaging than some extra flesh around the middle. Undergoing the risks of abdominal surgery? Going to the expense to get the belly of Angelina or Reese? Having my friendly surgeon create a brand new belly button?

No thanks, I’ll keep the slightly limp, horizontal telltale version I have. After all, my mother gave it to me.