awareness | Excitement on the side

Tag Archives: awareness

I took a shower in my bathing suit and I feel dirty.

Posted on July 17, 2013 | 14 comments

Sometimes you have to take a stand. And today I decided that I am not an old, naked lady at the gym. Well, not all of the time.

Sometimes I am. But today I had to make a split decision.

I am pro-naked. I blame it on coming of age in a high school theatre dressing room but it really doesn’t matter where it started. I am pro-body acceptance. In my mind the more bodies that you see, real bodies, the less likely you are to hate on your own. I work hard at not picking my body apart and ordinarily when I am given the opportunity to show someone else what an average middle aged woman’s body looks like I take it.

I am not yet one of the gals well beyond their middle years that stand in the locker room blowing their hair dry au naturale, chatting up my lady friends while they strap their aged bazooms in to their sensible nude brassieres. But if I am honest with myself I know that I will be one of those ladies one day.

But not today. Today I showered in my bathing suit.

“Hi! Is Emily here?” said the young girl in the shower across from mine.

I had just turned on the shower, still in my suit, as is customary. I like to wash my hair and let the soap drip on my swimsuit, pull it off and rinse it out while I leave conditioner in my hair. It’s an efficient system and one I recommend. I digress.

Four words made me turn my back on my system. “Hi! Is Emily here?”

“Nope, she isn’t here today, she’s at art camp this week.” I shampooed while we talked. And before I knew it I was rinsing my hair and putting in the conditioner, still in my swim suit.

“Ok. Maybe we will see you this afternoon.”

Umm… you were about to see a whole lotta me, actually. I’d already given them an eye full of an awful lot of tattoos they had previously not seen. And I just wasn’t sure if I could in good conscience be “Emily’s Mom That We Saw Naked At The Gym” for the rest of the summer.

And now I am wrestling with that decision. Did I miss my opportunity to let my freak flag fly in the form of a nudie shower in the community gym locker room? Did I make the right choice?

“Mom, did you get totally naked in front of my friends?”

“Uh. Yeah. Because women shouldn’t be ashamed of their bodies.”

I didn’t want to have that conversation. Not yet.

So, I showered in my bathing suit and now I feel dirty.

I am doing my part to rid my corner of the universe of body shame, I am. I just can’t wrap my mind around chit chatting with my daughter’s friends while I am stark naked. Not yet.

But when I am 60 and they are 30? Game on. Her gal pals will be leaving tennis club and they will roll their eyes as I head towards the showers “There goes Em’s mom. Grandma never wears clothes.”

“And she sings when she wears head phones. She is ridiculous.”

For your viewing pleasure – these are some weird wall stickers in the yoga room at the gym. So, what do you see? Olives? I used to see olives.

But lately… all I see is boobs, everywhere I look. Especially in the locker room.

14 Comments

Posted in Nonsense, Parenting

Tagged awareness, body shame, boobs, health, locker room, mental-health, motherhood, nudity, Parenting, raising girls

I bet you’re worried.

Posted on August 11, 2012 | 23 comments

Sometimes I worry about whether or not I am doing a good job accurately portraying my life here. If I am honest it is equal parts worry that my readers will think I am insufferable (how often does anyone want to read about how perfectly splendid life is?) and worry that I am somehow failing to see what is right in front of me, fearing that I am not actually as content as I think I am. Both scenarios are troublesome. The first because I certainly don’t want to alienate the masses (heh) (whom I clearly crave approval from on some level because I have been more than upfront about my insecurity.) And the latter because I am always afraid of the monster under the bed. (Lucky for you I do not fear the sentence fragment or the dangling participle. I fearlessly embrace the run-on sentence.)

I worry that if I write about the Good it will be boring. And there is so much Good, so much genuine Greatness in my world right now it is hard to write of much else. I want to tell you about the shoes I decoupaged and how I might be a little bit in love with Mod Podge.

But it really hasn’t been long since I posted about Em’s room and I fear that incessant posting about my craftiness will read as “Look at Me! Validate me! Aren’t I worth something now that I am a mostly stay at home mom!?!”

So I have been quiet this week. Not for lack of things to say but for fear that I am not being authentic.

And then today as I peeled off the sports bra I have been wearing all week (does any nursing mother wear a normal bra unless she is “going somewhere”) I started to laugh. Four nursing pads, a pen, a paper towel, an iPhone cable and a dolphin.

It takes me a minimum of two trips to leave my house. The other day at the chiropractor it was noted my shirt was on inside out. This morning I walked around the house with the plastic cup that lives in the dog food bin in my hand for five minutes. It was not until I went to make a phone call on said plastic cup that I noted that my phone was in the bin. I am drinking a cup of coffee right now and I am reasonably certain that if you went in my kitchen right now the cabinets containing the mugs and the Keurig cups would be open. And apparently I stuff random crap in my bra.

My house is clean. My laundry is folded. The beds are made and the bathrooms wiped down. Because that is the way I like it. I get a lot done during a day. I like doing projects. But all this does not add up to make me a Stepford wife.

Stepford wives do not get squeezed out of their own beds when their husband goes out of town.

I am still me. I can be happy and still not have my shit together. I can get a lot accomplished in a day and still be scatterbrained. I can have a clean(ish) and organized house and not be all Martha Stewart.

The other night I found myself telling someone that I had seen an awesome pin on Pinterest. “You know that smell in Williams & Sonoma? It is lemon, rosemary and vanilla extract!” I could hear myself talking and on the inside I was thinking who the hell am I? Then in my next breath I was saying that my kitchen currently smells like a very clean marijuana smoking device.

Since Lucy has started eating more and is sitting at the table frequently I have been very careful to make sure I only wipe the kitchen table down with Simple Green. I bought my first bottle of Simple Green in a head shop in the mid 1990s to clean the resin from my precious glass. So while 36 year old Kelly peruses the internet trying to figure out a way to make her kitchen smell like Williams Sonoma instead of the inside of a very clean bong 21 year old Kelly would be pleased to know that she has not been forgotten.

I’m kind of afraid of becoming a happy suburban mommy. I am afraid that five, ten years from now I will look backwards and think why did I Mod Podge everything I own? How many front door wreaths does one girl need? I am afraid that my DIY decor will scream single family income and too much free time. But mostly I am afraid that I will get so far away from who I was that I won’t realize that my kitchen smells like a head shop.

If you’ll excuse me I have half a bottle of Chianti to drink while I ruminate on this subject. Lucy is going to start crawling any second. I need to sit on my ass and navel gaze while I can.