Women Thinks Her Mommy Makeover Procedure Didn’t Work. See Her Before-and-After Photos (Exclusive)

Norma Avelar had seen plenty of success stories (and horror stories) before getting a mommy makeover earlier this year, but she hadn’t heard of anyone having an in-between experience like she did.

While Avelar loves her results now, it took a few months before she felt like she was happy with her decision to get plastic surgery. In the first few weeks post-op, though, she was convinced her tummy tuck simply didn’t work.

“You start with a lot of self-doubt,” Avelar tells PEOPLE of her initial thoughts after surgery. “‘What did I do? When did this go wrong? I’m looking like a potato.’ Some people that have gone through it were like, ‘You have to trust the process.’ That really annoyed me.”

Avelar admits that she thought she’d see results quickly, and that absolutely wasn’t the case.

Avelar decided to get her mommy makeover — which typically involves a tummy tuck, breast augmentation and body contouring — nearly two decades after having her first child. She had her first child when she was 16 and she laments never having that “flat, nice belly” that her friends had at that age, after she gave birth.

“After my first pregnancy, I already had all the loose skin and the stretch marks, and I always felt self-conscious, but I was struggling financially,” she says. “I was a young mom, and even though I would see it, and I’m like, ‘Oh, someday I would like to do that,’ but financially, I wasn’t there.”

She says it was several years down the road when she met the man she would end up marrying, and they had two more kids together. It only increased her discomfort with how her body looked. She tried skin-tightening procedures, including Morpheus8, but nothing quite got her the results she wanted.

And “mom guilt” set in, knowing there was always something for the house or for her kids that she “should” be spending this money on instead.

A turning point came at age 41, and she was ready to pursue plastic surgery. Avelar started by reaching out to Melinda Farina from The Beauty Brokers, a consultation service that matches patients with the right plastic surgeon for them. Farina sent Avelar three surgeon options, including two in New York and Dr. Kevin Mosca in Florida, whom she ultimately chose, despite her home base being Boston and needing to travel to see him.

Afraid she would “chicken out,” Avelar put down her deposit to lock in the surgery, which she says cost about $27,000. Her six-hour procedure in March included a breast lift and augmentation, a tummy tuck and liposuction of the flanks. The surgery went off without a hitch, though she did experience an issue with her drains not fully functioning properly post-op. (Drains are inserted under the skin to remove the excess fluid in the days after a tummy tuck.)

Avelar’s husband traveled to Florida with her, but he was only able to stay for the first few days. After that, she was left in the Airbnb alone to recover, and that’s when she felt like things started to go downhill. She could “barely” get out of the recliner she was supposed to sleep in, she couldn’t breathe properly and everything ached.

To help pull herself through it, she started posting her “real” stories on TikTok.

“You see the fluff and the glitter in the bikini, but I’m like, ‘Yeah, no, I am crying on my recliner,'” she says of how she felt at that point and for weeks after. In one post-op video that she shared, she wrote that she was hoping to have a “hot mami summer” but instead she’s at home crying, thinking that maybe her surgery didn’t actually work.

The comments on her content were mixed, with some calling her “lazy” for getting surgery and then complaining about it, while others praised her for being so open about the whole journey.

“We moms, I promise you, we don’t do [mommy makeover surgery] because we’re lazy. We don’t do it because we’re vain,” Avelar says. “Motherhood takes such a toll on our bodies. We just want to reclaim some of that back. At some point, we don’t even recognize ourselves in the mirror anymore, like, just give me a little bit of my body back.”

Others still would comment and ask her why she “hates” her body so much that she wanted to use surgery to change it, but Avelar says it’s not a hatred at all. In fact, she chose to get a mommy makeover because she loves her body and all it has given her.

“I want to honor it, that’s why I did this,” she says.

Many women contacted her after she started posting her doubts about her recovery and said they’d actually had the same concerns, but no one talks about it. Avelar says they thanked her for being one of the few who openly shared that she didn’t bounce back after surgery.

“Probably 80% of us aren’t bikini-ready right away,” she says, joking that they’d all been “set up” by those women who did bounce back and by plastic surgeons leading them to believe it would be a quick recovery.

“I think once we get through the recovery process, the glow up is real, and I don’t regret it,” Avelar says. “I would do it all over again. I would just prepare for that mental and physical toll that it takes on you.”

Ultimately, she says she wishes someone had been more forthcoming with her about just how much swelling she would experience and how mentally exhausting it could be to go through with all of it. But maybe it comes down to knowing the right questions to ask ahead of time and doing as much research as possible. For other women getting mommy makeovers, Avelar hopes her TikTok videos showing how hard it was for her can help them prepare.

Avelar ended up staying in Florida for three weeks to recover after having to add an extra week to deal with her drains not working. With the help of lymphatic massages, she was finally able to get the drains removed and fly home.

“It’s such a slow healing process, and you don’t see it,” she says now that she’s five months post-op. “I made a point every day to take pictures, and I’m like, ‘There’s got to be a way that I can measure progress, because my mind is not seeing it.’ So I started measuring myself too, and I could see the swelling going down. The numbers don’t lie.”

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Once she hit three months post-op, she started to feel better about her progress. Avelar admits, though, that she would still have ups and downs with what she saw in the mirror. There were days when she’d liken herself to a pumpkin or a Capri Sun pouch, while the next she felt “snatched.”

Connecting with other women via social media has made the journey a little more bearable — and the fact that she readily (and confidently) poses in a bikini now that her body is mostly cooperating.

“We’re not doing this for vanity,” she says of herself and fellow mothers getting this plastic surgery. “We’re not trying to compete with hot 20-year-olds. We just want to reclaim our confidence and our bodies.”