I went camping for a night a couple weeks ago. "Only one night?" is the response I get when I tell people about it. But a night without cell service or running water is a decent amount of time for me. I am what I am, and I'm content with it. I'm also content to let others be who they are. My loved ones had a camp site for a week and I joined them for a sleepover and some fun, including making s'mores and swimming in the river.
And I wore a bathing suit when we went swimming.
I wore it for my niece.
At the end of the day, I felt that I could be around my close friends and feel like I was in a safe space, but that safety probably wouldn’t have been enough of a reason for me, even now.
Even now, I still have bad body image days. I still struggle with the messaging I’ve received my whole life about my body. I still wish I could change this or that about my size, my shape, my skin. Any number of things at any time. Wearing just a swimsuit with no shorts or swim top or some other method of covering my body wouldn’t have been on my itinerary, but…
I wore it for my niece.
My eldest niece is (very recently) four years old and she notices EVERYTHING. She likes to sit in my lap and trace my features with her small fingers, especially the mole on my left cheek that I have informed her is a beauty mark because I am so beautiful. She beams up at me like I am a vision; her mother describes her as “smitten”.
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On the second day of camping, my niece took some alone time at the edge of the camp site.
I launched my writing business so that I would have a flexible schedule. I wanted a flexible schedule for three reasons: 1) ability to audition for/book film work 2) travel 3) being an Auntie is super important to me.
My eldest niece really adds weight to number three. She was 2.5 years old when I launched t+t; I had been with my timesuck company for 3+ years and had been telling them I needed help so that I could go down to 4 days and spend more time helping with my niece (and inevitable nephew) for… a long while. Too long of a while. My nephew was 4 months old when I quit working for the timesuck, at the same time I launched my online biz, and then COVID closed the world for awhile. I had done it. I had created a world in which I could spend weekday hours with him and his mama and his sister without it being a whole production. I was in lockdown, but I had done it.
My niece makes a lot of sense to me. She’s silly, she’s thoughtful, she needs space sometimes. She likes to be kind and helpful but she also has boundaries. She loves camping, but four nights in a camper and on a site with her mother and brother is a long time without being able to go off on her own for awhile. She’s a lot like me, for better or for worse.
So she took some alone time on Friday morning. I conferred with her about it to make sure she wasn’t feeling sick, sad, or left out. I asked her, “Do you know that if I do what you say you want and give you some space, that I still love you from over there?”
She assured me (and pinky promised me) that she did.
So I told her that if she needed me, to holler or come on over, and off I went. Her brother took her a banana at one point, but then stood next to her. She was polite about it: “K, please let me have my alone time. I would still like my alone time please. PLEASE LET ME HAVE MY ALONE TIME, K!!!”
He didn’t get it, but I did.
My reason number three means the world to me.
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When I was deciding what to bring camping and what to wear and if I should wear shorts over my swimsuit if we went to the river, I asked myself: “What do you want to show B about the world she lives in?”
What I wanted to show her was a woman in a plus-size body who isn’t ashamed or embarrassed to look the way she does. A woman who loves swimming and is happy to spend hours in the water with her niece. I wanted to give my niece an opportunity to ask about my cellulite or why my body is so much bigger and paler than her mother’s, if she wanted to. But of course she didn’t. She just wanted to play and to push herself to be brave enough to go out in the deeper water with me there to guide her.
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By the time my swim coaches were telling my mother, “She could be Olympic-bound”, I hated wearing a swimsuit. My body was “wrong”. It was so much bigger than my peers’ bodies. They were lithe; they didn’t have calf muscles at 7 or full shoulder muscles at 8. Their legs dipped in between their knees and hips. They were often a head shorter than I was.
We had to decide if that would be my life: in the pool morning and night. Up in the dark to practice before school, back to the pool afterward. No soccer, no basketball, no theatre, and essentially no clothing.
I retired early. Not only because I didn’t want swimming to be my life, but because I didn’t want wearing a swimsuit to be my life.
Then, at 14, I dislocated my left shoulder. Just a little. Just enough that it’s never been the same. The motion of a front crawl was alright. A back crawl? No way.
I haven’t been able to enjoy swimming in more than 2 decades.
But lately, I wander in the evenings with mellow music in my ears, or stroll to the cafe with my friend and 1.5 year old niece. I have aggressive dance parties in my living room to what some would refer to “offensive” rap; those people have obviously never had their hands on their knees, shakin’ ass, on their THOT shit, and that sucks for them.
Swimming (even the small, non-competitive amount) that I did in the river felt good. The wander we did later in the evening felt good, too. There is no need to hurt myself moving. Life will hurt you all on its own.
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I wore a swimsuit - only a swimsuit - to the river and I swam till I was too hungry to stay in the water, like the water baby I was in my youth, who spent hours in her uncle’s pool. I wore a swimsuit - only a swimsuit - and felt like I was free.
I wore it for my niece.
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