Mothering In A Swimsuit

Yesterday, I was at my salon getting my hair cut and highlighted when somehow the conversation turned to women’s swimsuits. This was actually part two of a conversation that began during my previous appointment. During part one of the conversation, my stylist and I both agreed that trying to be a good mother while on the beach in a swimsuit is feat destined for failure. Unless you want to be the diva mother that sits on your chaise lounge chair with your legs strategically arranged to look their thinnest (you all know you do this) while your cabana boy brings you umbrella drinks and your nanny is the one building sandcastles and body surfing with your kids, undesirable things are going to happen to your suit.

Specifically, swimsuits are not really designed for significant movement, and every mom knows it. However, who really wants to be remembered by her kids as the diva mom that never played with them on the beach? Not many of us, so, this typically leads to a series of movements not unlike the movements I remember doing in an interpretive dance class I took in college, all in an effort to maintain the swimsuit’s initial positioning. In sandcastle building, for instance, crawling and bending over is replaced with lots of slow, awkward up-down movements that increase the time requirements for building a castle by 1600%. Body surfing requires a full swimsuit check while still down in the water which, to be considered successfully executed, must be done in a timely fashion to coincide with a wave’s peak. It’s a move that requires some serious strategy, because taking too long means you’ll be caught looking like a beached whale lying on the shore trying to adjust your swimsuit while the water’s long gone.

During yesterday’s conversation, a.k.a. part two, we delved more directly into the design of the female swimsuit. I am convinced that one of the great truths in life is that the perfect swimsuit bottom does not exist. Apparently, this is simply one of those things that looks, to the casual observer, as if it would be an achievable goal but in fact, is completely impossible. Basically, your choice for a two-piece bottom is between a piece so large that it looks like a girdle from the 1940s or a piece so small that it reveals the C-section scar you were dying to share with the world and it’s only not a thong in the slightly technical sense. The former essentially sends the message to the world that your best years have most definitely passed you by. The later is, in my case anyway, just not gonna happen. Period.

Thus, what my stylist and I both seem to do is try to meld either of the two options into a third option, something that is somewhere in between the two original options. How do we do this? By playing around with the sizes of the swimsuits (you all know you do this one too). If it’s the girdle option, we try the extra-extra-extra small, which we know will only result in a case of gargantuan muffin-top, but we try anyway. If it’s the skimpy option, we try the extra-extra-extra large, which still doesn’t work, because at the end of the day, an almost thong is still an almost thong, regardless of the size.

So, after some coffee-induced reflection this morning, I came up with an idea. Why can’t companies like 3M or Super Glue Corporation get involved in the swimsuit business? They clearly have a valuable service to offer by incorporating some of their product lines into the swimsuit industry. Then, perhaps the swimsuit designers could design suits with (gasp!) just the right amount of fabric, covering us up the way nature intended, and, with 3M or Super Glue involved, the perfectly-proportioned swimsuits would stay in their strategically-placed original locations while we build sand castles with record speed. I happen to think these suits would go down in the fashion history books.

By the way, a big thanks goes out to my stylist, equally and magnificently talented in both the beauty and the comedy businesses. Thanks for the great post idea!