The Horror

Night yawns out before me, an eternity to grapple with as I twist sheets and stare at the ceiling.  I snap at my children like some feral dog and the sight of my husband's well toned torso is enough to drive me mad.

Yup.  Its bathing-suit-buying time.  That time of year when we peel off the layers of wool and uncover long neglected areas of the body.  Time to take inventory of what has changed over the last year and worse what needs to change in the next 6 weeks.

Blech.  I actually used to relish this time of year.  Before.  Before children, before 30, before I quit the gym for 6 weeks... I hate before.  I remember longing to shed my clothes and don a little bikini.  I recall the lightness I felt in the dressing room, the giddiness knowing that in a mere month or two I would feel the sunlight on my skin.  Ah, sunbathing.  Kissed by the rays, sitting by the pool.

Now, donning a suit is a mission in what I can hide while wearing very little.... the varicose  and spider veins trekking my legs, the bruises from unknown injuries, the cellulite rippling down the back of my thighs, the sad slow pull of gravity waging its war on my middle aged skin.

Alas, I cannot bring myself to purchase the Swimdress yet.  I find that I daydream about swimsuits from the early 1900s... cute!  Fashionable!  Emphasis on fashion instead of the figure!  Although I do wonder how many poor women drowned when their bloomers full of water dragged them beneath the waves.

Last summer we went to Palm Beach for a week and Dave Matthews had the cabana next to us.  While Dave is a great musician, male model will not be a fall back career.  He is though a doting husband and father and when I wasn't totally obsessed with sucking in my gut or positioning the legs in the most flattering pose, I noticed his lovely wife was... well, lovely but absolutely and completely average.  She was not too fat nor too thin.  She had brown hair.  I think she might have had cellulite.  Regardless, she was lovely and he treated her as such.  I wondered to myself how much thought she had put into her bathing suit and parading it out on the beach... she, the wife of a celebrity, sure to be photographed frolicking  on the shore... what must her angst be like during bathing-suit-buying time?

I guess if Dave Matthews' lovely regular wife can sport a bathing suit, I can too.  I mean it's not like the photogs will be out hunting me down on the beach!