1 Mom Reveals What Happened After She Got a Postpartum Tummy Tuck

The idea of a tummy tuck might seem enticing for those moms who've had a difficult go of shedding the baby weight.

At least, it was to Alexa Wilding, who was tired of not feeling like her once-sexy self after giving birth to twins.

"I remember on the bed wanting so badly to feel that sensual feeling again and realizing I had no idea how to be that way now," she said in a video for Allure. "And I remember lying on my side to face my husband and the skin fell over. It was like a landslide."

Worse for Alexa, she was left with postpartum muscle diastasis, which occurs when the muscles of the abdomen separate from the wall.

"Mine was so extreme that it hung off, and I had about three to four inches of extra skin," she said, adding that for a year after she gave birth, she was still mistaken for being pregnant.

While being treated for a hernia, she got an intriguing opportunity. She was offered the chance to have a plastic surgeon fix her diastasis and do a tummy tuck during the hernia repair surgery. The surgeon actually suggested a complete "mommy makeover," which also included a breast lift and liposuction, but she stuck with "just" the tuck.

Unfortunately, the procedure didn't last for long. Six to eight months in, her belly "started to look different." Her skin was "so stretched it lost its elasticity and we're going to have to maybe do another one."

Alexa realized she was being sold an erasure — and she wasn't going to do it again.

"It's this maidenhood to motherhood transformation," she said. "So many women are trying to erase that rite of passage from their bodies . . . I want to dispel the myth that we have to go to crazy lengths to erase maternity from our bodies. Because it's not gonna work. We're still gonna be mothers. We still left point A and got to point B. And we should be proud of all the steps we took to get there."