How My Relationship With Swimsuits Has Changed

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Snapshots of me in bathing suits feel like snippets of my self-esteem and self-worth at different stages of my life. Some show a girl or teenager in full bloom, confident, courageous and becoming curvaceous. Bikinis sat below the waist. One-pieces were low-cut with high-cut thighs. In my 30s, the suits had cups with underwire, some with flouncy skirts that floated up in the water.

Then there were props — like towels, T-shirts and wraps covering legs and hips, belly and breasts. When I felt fat or was fat, I thought a neatly tied sarong slung low on my hips would perhaps make my butt look smaller. Tugging and tying and spending way too much time looking in the mirror when I could have been at the pool, the lake, the sea. So much wasted time.

My photos are a tale of a life, from carefree to self-conscious and carefree again.

In the one with me in a denim blue one-piece with cut-out sides and a single strip of fabric attached from the bottom to the top, my right hand snakes up a pole next to a pool, and my left hand rests below my waist, hip cocked a bit.

My thick and frizzy hair is in ponytails. I was seven in 1970, at the resort where we spent many summers in the Poconos. A little girl smiles in a pose too old for her. I think my mother took this picture.

There is a photo of me with my mom and sister the next summer, and I’m wearing my favorite bikini — red, white and blue waves, with a white fringe along the tummy line. I could make the fringe dance when I wiggled my hips. My hair is short, like Dorothy Hamill’s, but wavy. The smile is reticent and tired. Maybe we posed for too many pictures that day.

We are standing on the steps of the pool, my 13-year-old sister sitting in front of me in a gold, brown and yellow flower-power one-piece. My mother, 37, is to my side with her arm around me, wearing a white suit with swirls of blue and gold peacock feathers and a built-in bra.

In 1973, I was buried in a hole on the beach while my sister waved a shovel above me. I’m laughing so hard I can almost feel the sand in my nostrils just looking at it. There was no telling what the bathing suit was like underneath the mound, except that it was certainly full of sand.

Then there’s the white suit with light blue accents around the plunging neckline, making the most of my tan. That snapshot is viewed through a telescope tube taken by a guy on the beach in Ocean City, Maryland, who told me to kneel and thrust my shoulders toward the camera. I’m 16 and think I’m fat. Looking at it now, I see that I’m not.

Bathing suits for summer camp were all Speedos, solid colors with racing stripes down the sides. They lasted one season only, swimming in lakes and chlorine pools.

I was 17 in a friend’s backyard pool when someone snapped a picture of me rising up out of the water, like Bo Derek in the movie 10. And I can tell you, I feel like a 10 in the aquamarine one-piece, my hair slick and black, and my breasts nearly spilling out of the top. Maybe I secretly knew the picture was being taken because I certainly look like I’m posing. My husband keeps that one on the fridge.

There were bathing suits that rolled down easily for topless beaches in Santorini, Greece, when I was 22. And suits that I didn’t mind getting saturated with salt and mud at the Dead Sea in Israel.

I wear a sparkly brown and green swimsuit in pictures from beaches in Egypt, where the Red Sea creeps along the desert. Oversized T-shirts covering up my now truly big body. One stands out, to me, though, in 1987. I’m looking at something off to the side. My mouth is open, a wide grin, my nose and eyes crinkle, the desert wind whips my long dark curls into a frenzy, and my face fills almost the entire frame.

The bathing suit and my body are captured only from the shoulders up, thin straps over tanned skin. Something clearly hilarious happened, and someone in our group of expats took my picture. I loved this photo so much that I blew it up to an 8x10 and framed it, and I also used it for online dating profiles in the late 1990s.

The most recent pictures of me in swimsuits show pure pleasure. This, as I am strolling in solid color one-piece suits, lounging in dry-heat saunas in Iceland, and wearing a long-sleeved bathing suit for cool days or nights in our outdoor swim spa in Baltimore.

Now, in my early 60s, comfort is key: suits that are easy to slip in and out of, convenient and quick to dry. I feel strong and smooth gliding through various bodies of water around the world, my hair still curly but now fully gray.

My body is at ease in its weight, size and structure. I’m grateful when my shoulders don’t ache with arthritis, when the muscles in my legs hold my knees straight, and when my right hip feels as good as the left.

These snapshots chronicle time and place, an emotional barometer, and states of mind. Some decades were carefree and wild; others, I preferred to stay hidden behind towels and T-shirts. At 62, I find myself free of the angst and anxiety of having to look a certain way. To please the camera. To hide my thick thighs and my full hips. The breasts — well, they were getting to be a problem, solved with reduction surgery when I was 60. So, hopefully, there will be no more suits with built-in bras for me.

What kind of swimsuit are YOU wearing this summer? Let us know in the comments below.