I generally don’t take pictures of myself in a swimsuit and then post them on the Internet.
And when I say “I don’t generally” I mean “It has literally never happened before this summer.”
Let’s be honest here: I’m pretty happy with the way I look, but usually the better I feel about myself is directly related to the amount of clothes I have on. Pregnancy + the natural effects of getting older do unkind things to skin and muscle tone, and the fact that I went through 5 pregnancies, each resulting in an 8-10 pound baby – and am now almost officially into ZOMG my late 30s - well. If you’ve been pregnant, you probably know what I’m talking about.
I’ve bought countless tankinis and skirted suits, thinking that that could be the solution to an, umm, soft belly and faded-but-never-going-completely-away stretch marks, but to be honest, they were the worst thing I could have done. The tankini tops always showed an inch of skin in the one place I absolutely did NOT want to show skin, and those skirts? Ladies, we may think we’re getting away with something, but truthfully we’re just drawing attention to the fact that there’s something we’d like to hide.
This year I decided I was done making do with “mom” suits. No making do with a cheap suit and cover-up. No unflattering tankinis or skirts that scream “I’M A MOM, DON’T BOTHER LOOKING OVER HERE.” No cramming myself into a painful “slimming” suits that feel like some kind of torture involving latex sausage casing.
I’d been eyeballing a yellow polka-dotted high-waisted bikini - a style I was pretty sure I could get away with since it would show skin while covering my “trouble” spot - on ModCloth for over a year, and decided it was time to go for it.
Only once I clicked over to the swimwear section, I couldn’t make up my mind. Yes, the two-piece was cute, but they have such a great selection of vintage-inspired one-pieces as well – suits that offer gentle slimming and shaping and a lower leg cutout that flatters without making it look like you’re hiding under as much fabric as possible. Plus, the sassy retro styles made the suits’ modest lines seem deliberate, not desperate. [click to continue…]
