Embrace the suit.

Simcha Fisher pointed at a HuffPost piece entitled "Moms, Put On That Swimsuit:"

You've got two choices every summer -- to put on a swimsuit or to skip it.

I have a lot of friends who do the latter.

They go to the pool with their kids, but they only put their feet in the pool. They sit on the sidelines, too concerned about what they look like and what others will think to embrace the joy of swimming with their kids.

Or they go to the beach, but stay under the umbrella instead of running into the ocean.

And it makes me incredibly sad.

Because when women stay on the sidelines because of insecurity, we are modeling unhealthy behavior to our children and we are missing out.

Your swimsuit does not define you.

Simcha's take:

More than once last year, I just felt too damn fat to put on a bathing suit. Just couldn’t do it. So I would go to the beach with the kids, and they would ask me to take them in the water and do that swishing thing, or catch them when they jump off the big rock — and I couldn’t, because I didn’t have a suit on.

They were crushed. It didn’t make any sense to them. Why would you not wear your swimsuit to the beach?  And they were right. Yeah, there are skinny, perky teenagers at the beach. Yeah, there are other moms who are frolicking around with their kids, and they’re wearing the same size bikinis as their toddlers. Not even with stretch marks! How do they even do that? And here I am, and I weigh more than I did when I was nine months pregnant with the youngest kid, who is now 2 1/2. How did I even do that?

More to the point, who cares? Feel fat? Stay in the damn water. No one will see you, and you can feel light and graceful for once. Sitting on the sand getting gritty and trying to tug your shorts and tank top over your flabby bits while the kids beg you to jump in? That is a great way to have a lousy afternoon.  If you want to be attractive, have fun. Laugh and be happy. That’s beautiful, even when you’re fat.

Here's my theory on the swimsuit problem:  

A lot of us just aren't used to seeing ourselves in swimsuits.  It's not like it isn't common to be seen in public dressed unflatteringly (baggy tops and ill-fitting jeans, I'm talking about you).   Unless you're wearing the wrong size, swimsuits aren't actually much worse.  

When I was about 30 (and, incidentally, about 50 pounds overweight, which is a lot when you're under five feet tall), I started taking adult swim lessons at the YMCA.

 I had taken lessons as a kid, enough not to drown if I fell in the pool, but I'd never swum "a lap" in my life.  

The first swimsuit-related lesson that I learned was that my suit, which had been carefully chosen to make me look as not-fat as possible, was not made for swimming.  The straps wanted to fall off my shoulders.  That week between my first-ever lesson and my second-ever lesson, I went to a sporting goods store and bought a basic Speedo-brand lap suit.  Something like this:  

No shirring.  No skirts.  No color illusions.  No underwires.  No sweetheart necklines.  No nothing.  Just a suit that would stay on when I moved in the water.  Because that's what they sold at the sporting goods store.

The big surprise, though, was it turned into the suit that I felt best in.  Because it was the suit that I put on, week after week after week, as I learned how to swim the way that swimming people swim.  I got used to how I looked in it, because I put it on every week in front of the mirror in the locker room.  

And I was surrounded by other people wearing the same kind of suit.  Some of them were fit and strong.  Some of them were enormously fat and disabled.  A lot of them were mothers of children in swimming lessons, like me.  And all of them got into the water, in their boring lap suits, and moved their bodies faster and more sleekly than they could move them out of the water.  Some of them smiled and leaped into the pool, and some of them worked doggedly at paddling from end to the other with looks of great concentration on their faces.  

And eventually it sank into my brain that how you look in your suit is so far from being important, compared to what you can do in your suit -- namely, get wet and possibly sandy, splash and play or work in the water, raise your heart rate and build upper body strength, exert yourself or relax and cool off.  

Just getting into any suit, regularly, can do wonders for how you feel in a suit.  I think it's a vicious cycle:  if you don't put it on often, you don't get used to how you look in one, and you associate it with feeling out-of-place, which feels visible.  When you are focused on how you look, you tend to imagine other people are too (when really, they don't care all that much).  Wearing a swimsuit frequently, especially if you use it to help you do something you want to do (like swim laps, or play with your kids at the beach) tends to make you realize that it's a totally normal thing to do, no matter what your shape:  put on a swimsuit and get in the water.  

So my advice to women who are looking for the perfect suit to minimize their thighs or whatever:  The most flattering suit is the suit you put on to do things in.  Find one that fits comfortably and doesn't want to fall off, and put it on every week.  If you don't live near the beach or belong to a YMCA like I do, go out in the sprinkler with your kids or something.  Make at least one outing somewhere where you will see lots of people of all shapes enjoying the water.  Do it often enough that you realize that the swimsuit is not something scary.  It's just a tool, a uniform.  And nobody's really looking at you anyway, except the people who love you and the little people who look up to you and are counting on you to show them how to be.

Comments

[Rebekka]

My new suit just came in the mail today, I am majorly self conscious about swimsuits but it was comfortable and the baby appeared genuinely excited by the colors.

I have a black swim dress, which I actually find quite comfy, but I have actually been laughed at openly for wearing it at a beach. Teenagers...

[bearing]

Swim dresses violate my can-you-actually-swim-in-it criterion. Too much drag. I guess it'll help you work your arms.

[Jenny]

I have two problems with swimsuits:

1) I feel naked in them. I also feel naked in skirts that are too short (like above my knee) so it isn't just a swimsuit thing. I also don't sleep in a nightgown for the same reason. I like having on pant legs. I know this is a problem of practice and could be overcome.

2) Razors. Here is the real problem with me and swimsuits. Ever since puberty I have not been able to just slip on a bathing suit without prior planning. I am of Italian heritage and, um, well, I don't know what else to say here. It's a problem because "maintenance" gives me a very uncomfortable and noticeable rash. It was hard and embarrassing as a teenager to have friends who did not seem to have the same issue. I have sometimes looked into lasers, but time, money. It is a lot of money to spend for me to potentially go swimming only very occasionally. There are no regular style swimsuits that cover this problem, but it does seem that more options have opened up in these last few years.

The last time I was in a swimsuit was Sept 1999. Sad but true. But I love the idea of becoming a lap swimmer. I fantasize about it every year when I go to the kids' swimming lessons.

[Kate]

Jenny, what about a rashguard? They are getting more common at beaches as more people have concerns about sun exposure, and they don't interfere with swimming.

[Kate]

A rash guard plus a board short like this would work.

http://www.swimoutlet.com/womens-board-shorts-c9384/

[Jenny]

Have to google what a rashguard is...A swim shirt. No, tops aren't my problem. :)

But I have found what I need! A legsuit! I didn't even know it was a thing besides $300 racing suits. Maybe there's hope.

http://store.speedo.com/p/legsuits/womens-monogram-legsuit/808737a

[bearing]

My kids all wear suits from CWear Australia that go down to just above the knee and come down to the elbow. They sell grownup suits too. You actually can get similar styles in the US for less money, but I haven't found any as well made.

http://www.cwear.com.au/p/1137581/navy-swim-suits---xs---xl-.html

[Rebekka]

I'm a dog paddler and indeed never use pools because I have a tendency to get sinus infections from the chlorine, so the drag doesn't bother me. I bought the dress during some modesty flip but it's apparently so outlandish here it has the opposite effect. I too have problems with razor burn on my thighs and I actually have scarring from it, which is why I liked the longer skirt, but the suit I just bought has a regular cut. I guess the older I get the less I care who will be offended by the little wobbles and flaws in my appearance! BTW I use a chlorhexidine surgical soap from the pharmacy after shaving and it cuts down on the burn if anyone is looking for tips. (It's a disinfectant not antibiotic.)

[bearing]

The chlorine bothers my sinuses too. Whenever I get in a groove of swimming more than twice a week, I lose my voice from chronic postnasal drip. Very annoying. I take a steroid nasal spray for it and it mostly solves the problem.

[Melanie B]

Chlorine tends to give me headaches. I stopped swimming when I was younger mainly for that reason. It just was not worth it.

These days my biggest stumbling block is that I only have opportunities to go swimming maybe two or three times in a summer and it never seems worth it to spend money for a suit that will get so little use. Especially when I seem to be in a cycle of having a baby every couple of years. My size changes so much that what I buy this year may not fit next year. I bought a suit after Bella was born and it's just too tight to be comfortable now.

So the last couple of years I've been the mom sitting on the side of the pool getting her feet wet not because I'm especially bothered by the way I look in a suit but because I'm too stingy. It's hard to justify buying a swimsuit I'll hardly ever wear when money is tight. It's not really a swimsuit issue at all, I haven't bought any clothes for myself in the past year. I find the idea of going clothes shopping vaguely important but when it comes down to "what shall I do today?" there are many things more important. I just don't prioritize it. And we come back to the question of priorities.