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A bathing suit can make or break you.

by Sally Naumko, edited by Traute Klein

Sally Naumko's humorous account of her annual struggle to find a bathing suit which will allow her to preserve her womanly self-esteem.

Note: For you viewing enjoyment,
pass the mouse over the photos
to read the captions.

Guest Author

Sally Naumko and I both live in Winnipeg, but we met on the Internet before we met in person. Sally is a gifted artist who does beautiful portraits of people and animals in various media. Her drawings can be seen on her website, linked below. Sally knows what a bathing suite can do for the emotional health of many women. I am not one of them. To me swimming and aquacising are everyday activities like walking and breathing. I don't care what I look like in a bathing suit, as long as I enjoy the exercise and as long as the lifeguard does not kick me out of the pool for being a public nuisance. I therefore have little comprehension of this topic and will let Sally tell the story in her humorous way.

Buying a New Bathing Suit

I have just been through the annual pilgrimage of torture and humiliation known as buying a bathing suit. When I was a child in the 1950s, the bathing suit for a woman with a mature figure was designed for a woman with a mature figure, boned, trussed, and reinforced, not so much sewn as engineered. It was built to hold back and uplift and it did a good job. Today's stretch fabrics are designed for the prepubescent girl with a figure carved from a potato chip. The mature woman has a choice. She can either stop at the maternity department and try on a floral suit with a skirt, coming away looking like a hippopotamus who escaped from Disney's Fantasia, or she can wander around every run-of-the-mill department store trying to make a sensible choice from what amounts to a designer range of fluorescent rubber bands. What choice did I have? I wandered around, made my sensible choice and entered the chamber of horrors known as the fitting room. The first thing I noticed was the extraordinary tensile strength of the stretch material. The Lycra used in bathing costumes was developed, I believe, by NASA to launch small rockets from a slingshot, which gives the added bonus that if you manage to actually lever yourself into one, you are protected from shark attacks. The reason for this is that any shark taking a swipe at your passing midriff would immediately suffer whiplash. I fought my way into the bathing suit, but as I twanged the shoulder strap in place, I gasped in horror. My bosom had disappeared! Eventually, I found one breast cowering under my left armpit. It took a while to find the other one. At last I located it flattened beside my seventh rib. The problem is that modern bathing suits have no bra cups. The mature woman is meant to wear her bosom spread across her chest like a speed bump. I realigned my speed bump and lurched toward the mirror to take a full-view assessment. The bathing suit fit all right, but unfortunately, it only fit those bits of me willing to stay inside it. The rest of me oozed out rebelliously from top, bottom, and sides. I looked like a lump of playdough wearing undersized cling wrap. As I tried to work out where all those extra bits had come from, the pre-pubescent sales girl popped her head through the curtains, "Oh, there you are!" she said, admiring the bathing suit. I replied that I wasn't so sure and asked what else she had to show me. I tried on a cream crinkled one that made me look like a lump of masking tape, and a floral two-piece which gave the appearance of an oversized napkin in a serviette ring. I struggled into a pair of leopard skin bathers with ragged frill and came out looking like Tarzan's Jane pregnant with triplets and having a rough day. I tried on a black number with a midriff and looked like a jellyfish in mourning. Next was a bright pink pair with such a high cut leg that I thought I would have to wax my eyebrows to wear them. Finally, I found a suit that fit, a two-piece affair with shorts-style bottom and a loose blouse-type top. It was cheap, comfortable, and bulge-friendly. So I bought it. When I got home, I read the label. "Material may become transparent in water." I am determined to wear this last resort anyway. I will just have to learn to do the breaststroke in the sand.

Sally's Art

Sally's Artwork
Beautiful pencil sketches of people and animals and anything else which people commission her to do

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