How to Wear a Swimsuit: a Checklist for Chubby Moms

Last week I ventured to the waterpark for my 11 year-old’s birthday. My weight has long been something that I have struggled with and wearing a bathing suit in public is a lesson in shame for me each time. For many years I did not wear a suit outside of my own backyard as I was so sure that I would be laughed at. This day, however, I was determined to slip on my swimsuit and be a part of my daughter’s special day.

I am a perpetual people-watcher and always seem to spy what others miss. That day was no different. Halfway through our day, I found myself on a lounger watching with one eye while my daughters and niece played on a play area and with my other eye on the adults around me.  I noticed in particular what I have deemed the ‘Corner Club’, which was a large group of mothers who seated themselves at the corner of the pool to best see everyone and spent the day not in the water with their children but on loungers making fun of other mothers that weren’t deemed up to their standards.  I have noticed this same club with different members at many pools and waterparks over the years, an older version of the same club that once existed inside the hallways of high schools all over the world.

I noticed was that I was I was invisible in my conservative swimsuit. No one seemed to notice me, the chubby Mama in the skirted polka dot suit who covered herself in a towel at all times not in the water. This was a great relief for me. I shame myself enough and to add the shame of others seemed unbearable. I fear that my self-esteem isn’t always great enough to weather criticism by other mothers.

What I also noticed is that those women who are also in the not-so-thin club with me that did not choose a conservative swimsuit were not so lucky. I watched multiple women in bikinis and other smaller suits as they were stared down and laughed at, over and over again. The Corner Club seemed to relish each time that they shamed a fellow woman and that woman appeared saddened. I felt sick to my stomach watching this spectacle.

After watching for a day I noticed a set of rules for fellow thick Mamas from this ‘Corner Club’.

1)Buy a bathing suit that covers as much of your body as possible. If a full body suit is available(a giant muumuu perhaps?), this is your best shot at not being body shamed.

  *       2)Immediately after leaving the water, cover yourself in a large towel or swimsuit cover-up. Head to toe coverage is best.

 3)Do not appear too confident. Head should be down at all times so that the world knows that you are full of shame for your imperfect body.

      4) Do not be in the presence of attractive men. The thin and perfect mothers around you should be the only women to have such people in their vicinity.

      5)Do not eat anything but vegetables and drink water alone. After all, you can just live off the fat of your body and deserve no joy from food.

If you follow all of these rules, you are (possibly) safe from being shamed while you enjoy your day at the pool with your children and will be ignored by the perfect mother’s clubs that have gathered together in groups where they have the best vantage point to take everyone in and judge as needed.

Fuck that. 

My rules for chubby moms going to the pool with their children:

1  1)  Wear whatever suit you feel fucking fantastic in. I prefer a conservative suit with a skirt that hides my bum. If you feel amazing in a bikini, please wear that bikini with pride—you look beautiful in it.

2   2) Cover yourself up if you want or don’t if wish not too. You’re at the pool so soak up the sun and water, no need to cover yourself up all day.

3   3) Be confident. Strut your body—the body that allows you to enjoy this day with your children, the body that may have created those same children inside you and fed them as infants.

4  4)  If you happen to be in the presence of an attractive man, especially if this man is your husband or partner, I suggest a healthy amount of public affection to remind the women in the Corner Club that he is yours. Multiple times, if needed.

5    5) Eat and drink whatever you want. What you put in your body is nobody’s business but yours. This day is yours to enjoy with your children and no one has the right to make you feel badly.

I will no longer be silent when I watch other women be shamed. I am tired of being silent so that I will not also get the wrath of these vultures. We all deserve the right to be with our children without being shamed. Damn all of the “rules” that the world wants us to follow.

I’m off to the pool again, Loves, with my children in tow. I’m still wearing my skirted suit, but plan to wear it with pride. I will hold my head up for I have no reason to be ashamed. My body is my business, not the business of the mothers who live to shame others. I plan on greeting the other members of the Chubby Moms’ Club with exuberant compliments on their choice of suits, because they look incredible in their own skin doing what they love—spending time with their children, haters be damned.

Burn

I'm sitting around a campfire tonight, reading and listening to the birds in the trees and the frogs in the creek. 

Earlier this summer we had a veritable swarm of lightning bugs at night, more than I'd ever seen in my lifetime. 

Tonight there is just one solitary lightning bug, swimming in circles in the air around me, punctuating the night with the tiniest beam of light. 

We often think that more is best. Sometimes it is. I was awestruck months ago by show in my backyard by hundreds of lightning bugs. It was magical.

However, tonight this single bug concentrated it's glowing majesty around me in such a way that I couldn't help but feel honored by the universe in way that I never had before.

More isn't always better. One single being can light up the darkest of nights and shine the way out of the deepest, darkest of times.

Be a goddamned light. Especially in times of darkness. Your light is not unnoticed.

Burn, baby, burn.

Like an Animal

When we say that someone is "like an animal", it's not meant as a compliment. It means that someone has lost control and is violent or desperate. 

However, I was lying on my back in the pool tonight, watching the sky. The birds and the dragonflies were flying above and me and I couldn't help but want to be like an animal. Not in the way that the phrase is often used but like an animal in the way that they are in the moment, flying through the air without a care or worry, not thinking about the past or tomorrow. 

I floated in the pool, weightless, allowing the tension in my muscles to float away and clearing my mind of anything but the skies above me. I felt as free as the birds flying over me, like an animal in the best of ways. 

I need to escape my own humanity more often.

We Cannot Always Choose Happy

I’m one of those people that always have positive quotes posted around me. I struggle with anxiety and depression and having inspiration posted around me helps me to keep my mind straight. My cubicle at work, my car, my home, my coffee mugs-- they are all covered in positive quotes, memes and photos. Yes—I’m THAT person.

Recently, however, I have been struggling with a bout of sadness. I have found myself raw with feeling as I navigate working through the mourning of being a victim of a violent crime twenty years ago and finally working through the mess of my feelings that comes with that. I’ve found myself struck with tears at the most inopportune of times and suffering through the nervousness and jumpiness that comes with having my fight or flight system ‘on’ twenty-four hours per day. I am a bundle of uncomfortable emotions, just barely held together enough to continue with my day-to-day life.

I’ve found that in this raw state that I cannot tolerate the false cheerfulness of quotes pasted over a bright sunshine or motivational talks to let go of my sadness and smile. It just doesn’t ring true to me where I am right now, in this place of darkness. I am exhausted by false cheer. There are some days that I must sink into the melancholy of life. 

I have a friend on social media that is always posting the words ‘Choose happy’. She is a lovely person that lives her life trying to help others. However, I had to temporarily hide her posts. I believe that there are times that we can, indeed, choose happy. There are also times that we must feel the shitty emotions-- the pain, the sadness, the grieving-- and not doing so is detrimental to our souls. I cannot at this time in my life deny these emotions that I have denied for twenty years.

This time has been a great lesson to me. In my personal life and in my work as a nurse I have spent many hours cheering people up. I hope to continue to do so. However, I must also allow those suffering to truly feel their emotions and not encourage them to paste a false smile over their raw emotions-- doing so is a toxic mistake.

We have become a society that has forgotten the value of our ‘negative’ emotions. We hide behind pretty selfies and cheerful social media posts when inside we are reeling. We have forgotten how to allow ourselves permission to have bad days and to experience the heavy emotions that can come with life.

I will choose happy another day. However, for today I will feel the crushing sadness, the grief and the anger. I will ignore the cheerful quotes and pretty pictures and instead immerse myself inside the pain. I will allow myself to burn inside the fire that been kindling in my heart for twenty years and has been denied the chance to flame. I will emerge from the fire stronger than ever before. I will be lighter without this burden and instead of pasting on a false smile over my pain; my smile on the other side of this will be true and real.

There is nothing wrong with honoring all of your emotions. I get to choose. You get to choose. There is no shame in not choosing happy for today. Happiness will still be waiting for you tomorrow. True happiness is not the smile pasted over your tears, it is the happiness that shines through after you’ve worked through all of the shit that weighs your heart down. It’s often not an easy journey—I hope you choose to take it anyway.

I am a White Mother Crying Out For an End to White Privilege.

White privilege. A term that I don’t even think I knew about until less than ten years ago and honestly didn’t really believe in until becoming a public health nurse six years ago. I am ashamed that I once believed, not too far into my own history, that white privilege was something that existed only generations ago and had been eradicated.

Now, in my current work, I go into the places in my community with the most desperate of poverty and people of every color.  I now see the evidence of white privilege every single day. Every.single.day. I can no longer turn away and ignore that my pale coloring keeps me safer, allows me an easier time of gaining education and employment and allows me freedom from the fear of being harmed or killed because of the color of the skin that I was born with.

I woke this morning to the news that in the past 24 hours police murdered two black men in our country. I say murdered because the evidence that we have in regard to both cases appears to show that neither man were doing anything at all wrong. I watched the Facebook Live video of the immediate aftermath of the police shooting of Philando Castile, a 32 year old black man who it appears had done nothing more wrong than have a broken tail light. Yesterday, I watched the heart-wrenching video of a 37 year-old black man, Alton Sterling, shot while pinned to the ground and then watched as his teenage son broke down and wept as his mother cried out for these shootings to end.  This trend of black men being shot down by white police officers is not a new trend—in fact it is rare for a week to go by in this country without seeing such an event.

It’s a sickening realization that my white privilege allows me many things. However, the best of these privileges may be to not fear being shot down by those that are supposed to protect me.

For many years, I have stayed relatively quiet about the things that I have seen happening around me in this country. I have felt that these losses weren’t mine and I did not have the right to mourn these black men or feel enraged at the injustice against those of color in our court and jail systems or weep with great sadness after a day of schlepping through a low-income neighborhood full of undereducated people of every color but white knowing that the bright minds of the children I serve will likely never get a college education because of many factors, one of them being their very skin color. I have felt that it was unfair of me, as a white woman, to try to use my voice over the voice of those impacted as for too many years in this country we have allowed white people to be the voice of all.

What I am realizing today is that I can no longer be silent. The ideas that have kept me silent are ideas of separation and to eradicate the horrors of what are happening today, we must all stand together.

I stand and acknowledge that I have privilege over others in this country simply because of my skin color. My children have those same privileges.  My oldest child is getting his learner’s permit and is learning to drive. Soon he will drive on his own. I will worry about him as all mothers do. I will not, however, lie awake in my bed wondering if he will be pulled over for a busted tail light and end up dying in his own blood while his girlfriend and her daughter watch the life go out of his eyes. My son’s privilege means that he will be frustrated to be pulled over but will not fear for his own life. My privilege means that my son can be pulled over and I will not fear to lose him, one of my children that I love more than myself. I will not fear that my son will be shot for selling CDs as he has done for years. I will not fear so many speechless things that mothers and fathers and sons and daughters must fear everyday. Mothers and sons all over this country do not have the simple privilege of knowing that the police are there to protect and not harm you. Even as we all acknowledge that 99% of our police force are honorable men and women in an intensely stressful job, we also must acknowledge that the 1% of racist and dishonorable men and women police officers are allowed to exist in a old boy’s club where we have been taught to look away when wrongs happen.

I can no longer look away, even safe as I am in my white skin, safe as my children are in their white skin. I cannot look away even though there is a great underbelly of racism in the white community that is deeply angered and sometimes violent if we broach the subject-- My fear does not hold a candle to the fears that so many feel everyday. If we look away, we become a part of the problem as surely as though we held the guns ourselves. Young men are being murdered by those sworn to protect them. I will not look away. I will not. Not until every mother in this country can sleep with the knowledge that their sons will not be murdered for any tiny infraction.  Not until the murders, modern day legal lynchings, have ended. Not until every child has the same rights as my own.

I am white. I am privileged in many ways including that I do not fear that police officers will take my life on a sidewalk or routine traffic stop, even if I have done nothing wrong.  I will not be silenced until everyone has those very same privileges.

SaveSave

Hope and Garbage

In the middle of an inner city neighborhood, on a tiny corner of green space wedged between two dilapidated houses stands a clumsy frame of the word 'hope'.  Instead of the bright beacon of light we normally associate with the word, this hope is full of garbage-- crumbled, used waste. 

I had to stop. You see, I saw myself in this artful pile of trash-- so much so that I parked on the side of the road and wept as I looked out at the structure. I felt long-buried feelings of worthlessness bubbling up to the surface. 

My entire life I've struggled with self-worth. Even as a child, I struggled to simply feel worthy for life, itself, let alone any good things. I have treated myself like garbage, as if I was simply the detritus left in the wake of someone better. I have often wondered why everyone around me seemed to have it all together when I was suffering so inside my head. It has always seemed that I am missing a piece that everyone else is born with as I seem to fit in nowhere. 

I drove past this the same day that an article I wrote in which I finally come forward as a rape survivor after twenty long years of silence went live to the world.  I have long wondered if I deserved what happened to me that night-- if I am worthless, deserving of terrible, awful things. I have spent my life gathering evidence to support my belief of unworthy.  Shame will take you deep in the darkness in unspeakable ways and much of my life has been spent inside the velvet obscurity of depression. 

Today I dredged deep into the filth inside myself and I pulled it out into the light where the shame will die(shame cannot live in the light). I am taking out the trash and using that pain to give others hope. 

Bringing up the shame is excruciating. 

Bringing up the shame is beautiful. 

It is excruciatingly beautiful.

I am on a roller coaster of emotion, the ups and downs coming with no warning.However,  I firmly believe that this roller coaster will end with my feet solidly planted in the light, with no garbage in sight.

I am thankful for my time living in the dumpster of despair. It has reminded me how lovely the light is and that we cannot appreciate love without the juxtaposition of hate. At the end of even the darkest journey lies hope, as hope always lies in wait in the most unexpected of places.
SaveSaveSaveSave

Are We Taking Modern-Day Criticism Too Far?

I always know that an article that I have written is doing well and being widely shared when I open up my messages to find cruel remarks inside. It is simply a fact of writing on our modern-day internet. The internet is full of trolls that thrill in sitting in anonymity behind the glow of their computer screen and writing cruel things to others. 

The past few months have been a time when I chose to dig deep, push past societal stigmas and come forward with really painful things in my life. It has not been easy for me, even though I feel that if I helped even a single person that it was worth it. 

When my article about being a suicide attempt survivor went live, I received messages saying that they wish I "would've been successful" at killing myself, that I was a "loser and an embarrassment to their country" and that I will be going to hell. This was my first article to go "viral" and was my first experience with how ugly people can be. I sat vigil through the night that first night, reading the messages and weeping. Very few times in my life have I felt as alone as I did that night. 

When my article about being a rape survivor went live, I received messages stating that I am "so ugly that I should be grateful that I was raped", that I should've "relaxed and enjoyed it" and a few pornographic pictures mixed in(Hey, boys- unsolicited dick pics are never cool, Man. Keep your pants on.) I was not prepared both for the vulnerability that I felt in the days after that piece first hit the internet(and still feel to some degree today), for the few friends that turned away from me and made me feel shame and for the onslaught of feedback, mostly wonderful but with some powerfully hateful things missed in. I became physically ill and I truly believe that my body could not handle the immediate and overwhelming emotions that I was not in any way ready for. I went to bed for days and when I finally was able to emerge from my self-imposed isolation, I can tell you that I was not the same person than I was when I went into my cocoon- in ways both wonderful and awful.

Yesterday, when an article that I wrote to bring awareness to CMV(a virus) went live I received messages stating that I'm a "fear mongering bitch" and again that I'm going to hell( what is it with internet trolls and hell?). This time, I was rather shocked by the hate even after growing a thicker skin through these past months. I was simply trying to help others to not suffer in the way that my friend and her family has. I still can't wrap my mind around why someone can find fault with that. 

My core belief since childhood has been that I am not worthy, a belief that many of us struggle with. These comments play on that fear, strumming the tight strings of my misery and giving evidence to that belief that I've tried to hard in my life to eradicate. It always amazes me how we seek and gather evidence to support any of our beliefs, even the ones that we wish we didn't have. It is so painful. 

I can receive dozens of lovely messages(thank you to those that have sent them!) but it is those awful comments that pluck at my heart and leave me feeling stuck. I find myself on a roller coaster of emotion as I swing from the highs of having a successful article and the lows of reading through the name-calling, criticism, and general ickiness of cruel messages and e-mails. 

Years ago, these comments would have made me take a break from writing--out of fear, out of that place of unworthiness, out of pure shame. I would have believed each and every unkind word, too mired in shame to refuse to acknowledge the cruelty. 

However, today-- even after shedding a few tears-- I am celebrating my response to these comments as a win. Why? Because instead of choosing not to write, I'm going write more and write harder in spite of the naysayers and in honor of myself. In the words and advice of the great Cheryl Strayed, today I'm gonna "write like a motherfucker." 

Write on criticizers of my work-- I will use your hate to fuel my flame. I am truly sorry for whatever circumstances of your life have led you to such a low place that this is the way that you choose to spend your days. I refuse to concede to your assholery. You may think of me as your nemesis--wherever you choose to bring darkness, I will bring the light threefold. The war has begun. The light will win. 

SaveSave
SaveSave