Mina Starsiak Hawk had to get past her own feelings of “mom-guilt” about her decision to undergo plastic surgery. After going under the knife last month for a tummy tuck, liposuction and breast implants, the Good Bones star told PEOPLE this week that she had been thinking a lot about why she initially wasn’t sure about her decision to get the procedures done, despite it not being a “spur of the moment decision by any means.”
“I was very hard on myself for wanting to do this because it’s super selfish,” Starsiak Hawk told the outlet of deciding to get a “mommy makeover” after the birth of 4-month-old daughter Charlie. “But I decided that’s OK, and I just have to keep telling myself that. …It’s like this mom-guilt that everyone else needs to be taken care of except you.”
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Deciding to get plastic surgery came after Starsiak Hawk underwent two C-sections for the birth of her daughter and older son, 2-year-old Jack. “You don’t go back to being the same after a baby, no matter what you do,” she said. “A lot of women really love and embrace that, but I just didn’t feel that way.” No matter what she was doing, the HGTV star admitted she “didn’t feel comfortable” in her body, which she noted was affecting all facets of her life, from her career to her sex life.
Having developed diastasis rectus that separated her abdominal muscles by almost 5 inches, Starsiak Hawk was also concerned about her core strength over the years. But she was most concerned about what her Instagram followers would say about her decision. “I wanted to be very open about this from the beginning,” she explained about her choice to announce her plans publicly. “I don’t want to post a family picture on our vacation a year from now and have people think, ‘Oh my gosh if I just work hard enough, I can have abs like that.’ Because no one tells you, ‘I had surgery to do this; my stomach would never look this flat, no matter how much I starved myself, no matter how many crunches I did.’”
While the Good Bones personality was ready to be shamed for her decision, she noted that the reaction was actually “overwhelmingly positive” and included other mothers who reached out with their own questions. “I expected to get a lot more judgment for it. But it was all, ‘I did this and never regretted it,’ and ‘You’re going to love it,’” she said, which led her to the realization that “women do this all the time but not a lot talk about it.”
