Because There’s So Much To Say about Swimwear

So, it turns out I have more to say about swimwear.

Yes, I thought I had basically said all there is to say two years ago with my post on mothering in a swimsuit. But then, I got an email from my friend Victoria S. Secret, purveyor of most things I’d never wear on account of I don’t need apparel to remind me that I’m no longer twenty-one. Normally, this would pose little temptation. At the moment, however, I was deep in the final decision-making about which version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a graphic novel version or a No Fear Shakespeare version) to use for a new class I’m teaching this fall. So when Victoria let out her little secret about free shipping and clearance prices on Things I’d Never Wear, I was game for a distraction.

Since it’s summer and all, I naturally clicked on swimsuits first.

And so it began.

Girlfriends and others, this proved an educational experience. I began scrolling down the page to look for suits with more than one square inch of fabric to them. Mostly what I found, however, were suits that would look great if you hadn’t birthed thrice and if you didn’t consider chocolate a far dearer friend than plastic surgery (like one woman I know).

Of course, it’s mainly about getting bang for my buck. Why dine at the pricey French restaurant offering beautifully presented one-ounce meals when you can get a much larger volume of poorly presented food substitute for the same price at the all-you-can-eat buffet, you know?

Yes, it does occur to me that this life philosophy might be why I need more fabric on my swimsuits in the first place.

And then, I noticed something. The models had all contorted themselves into these poses that are almost unfathomable, really. I mean, they kind of looked great, but they also looked weird. Seriously, look at some of them sometime, and then, assuming you are a female, do what I did next: picture attempting the same poses the next time you’re at the beach with your family.

I swear LCB and the small people would think I was convulsing.

I can just see it now. My younger son would shove a piece of driftwood in my mouth and tell me not to swallow my own tongue like he saw someone do on TV once. (“You’d be surprised at how much you can learn from watching TV,” he once informed me, utterly straight-faced.) It being the South and all here too, there’d probably be four score and seven people on the beach all surrounding me, offering to help while swapping recipes and stories of “that time Betty did something just like this, bless her now-ostracized little heart.”

It’d be awesomeness.

Then, I started looking more closely at some of the those two pieces and I started wondering, because apparently I’d just been struck stupid, if maybe there was actually more fabric on the bottoms than it appeared in the pictures because of the way the models were posing all contorted-like, which I had already established I would never do. I reasoned, “Don’t contortions typically bunch up clothing into a fraction of its regular size?”

This is how my brain thinks when it’s not.

I really don’t know why some days I exhibit such bad judgment. Who’s ever bought a suit like that and then, after receiving it in the mail and trying it on, says, “It looks great, just like in the pictures, but bigger and more flattering for the average woman”? I’ll tell you who’s ever said that. Like, in the entire history of humankind, you’d find maybe one half of one person who’s ever said that.

The whole thing is enough to drive me to chocolate, as in enough chocolate to add that additional half-person to the person who, trust me, is already quite whole.