Midlife on the Beach

Bodies, brains, and bathing suits

On the Beach, Robert Duckworth Greenham, 1934

When I was a kid, I went to a mid-Atlantic beach every summer. Though it was a small percentage of my lived life, my memories are packed with the seaside. The rickety beach house, the sandy sheets. The bikes and sweet ices. I pushed my body to its outer limits in the roaring surf. I found best friends and puppy love. My senses were overfull, screaming gulls and saltwater, boardwalk food and splintered summer feet. It was glorious and I went home every year wrecked and rebuilt, dramatically sad but also confident that this would be my year.

I miss that childhood confidence, unsullied by the opinions of the world. Untouched by the tyranny of bathing suits. I remember nothing of childhood swimwear, except the sand in the pants.

I am fighting the cliché — the midlife woman scrutinizing her brilliant, hardworking body as she shrink wraps it for public consumption. Judging the pocked thighs, the soft belly, the shelf that has risen triumphantly on the hips. Worrying the extra dangle on the upper arm, the southward drift of the breasts. The frowny knees, the veins. None of these things were evident in all those magazine spreads and billboards screaming at me for the last half century. None of those things are allowed.

I don’t remember a mirror in the rickety beach house.

Why are we such active, aggressive critics of our bodies? We know why: The dominant (patriarchal) culture has told us we are not right. Too much, not enough. To muddy the waters, dominant culture changes. Rubens’ goddesses are today’s gargoyles. And the elevated stick figures of today would be viewed as wretched paupers by many time travelers.

We are — as we all know in our deepest, most important places — not our parts. We are not the cultural narrative, in spite of Madison Avenue messaging.

As a teen, I spent a dreamy summer month in Greece. Staying with a family and swimming in the daily tide of Athenian life, I noticed this: The women around me were of all ages and sizes. Each and every one of them showed up for beach days — unabashed, entirely comfortable — wearing teeny tiny bikinis. Bodies of all sizes, maximum skin exposed to the glorious Mediterranean sun, seemingly unworried about posture, pose, or performance. Just a group of regular, animal bodies, enjoying a day on the beach.

After a lifetime of American beach blanket bingo, with the requisite sucked in stomachs and practiced parades, this sense of ease blew my mind. It was another planet. It’s anecdotal and I’m not sure what it ultimately says about bodies and culture, but it made a big impression. The memory surfaces when I catch myself judging my own perfectly fine body on the beach.

Midlife is teaching me to listen to the insistent voice in my brain; the whispered repetition of things that are logical and correct, but are shouted down and overrided by culture lies. All those years ago, I knew in my gut that the women I met in Greece had it closer to right. Poured comfortably into their beach chairs with little coverage and less care, they seemed not to hear the things that screamed at me. The soundtrack of magazines and movies, advertising and meddlesome relatives.

The Greek women on the beach were enjoying the day while I was internally preoccupied with some imagined, required, detestable performance. A catwalk that chafed at every fiber of my real self. A standard that had been slipped into every mother’s milk in 1960s America.

Bodies, I’ve noticed (finally), are like snowflakes. Each a pure individual, no match in creation. Marketing would like us to believe in a standard, and to chase it with singular focus. But there is no such standard. There is no body exactly like mine, or yours. No two breasts are alike, no two elbows or asses. Fashion sizing is arbitrary and often not standardized, which is why my maillot will not fit your supposedly same-sized body the same way it fits mine. It’s why her outfit doesn’t look (and therefore, feel) as good on you, even though you are supposed size mates. Bodies are gloriously different, despite the culture’s insistence that we aspire to a standard. The sooner we celebrate this fact, the sooner we can return to ourselves.

I’m initiating a belated love affair with my midlife, post-menopausal body. I’m shyly asking its forgiveness for a lifetime of covering up, complaining, and wrestling it into unattainable, airbrushed visions. I’m letting the pale parts see the sun, and loving the soft parts more.

So, you on the beach — I see you. You, in that magic body in a world with little belief in or respect for magic. A world where shame is woven into the fabric of femininity. I see you, and I think you’re gorgeous.

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Things to share:

• I haven’t done much baking in this inferno of a summer, but I did pull together this peach and blueberry cobbler. It was easy, beautiful, and absolutely delicious.

• The US Open starts in a few days and, as a longtime tennis fan, I am experiencing some giddy schadenfreude about Novax Djokovic. My loathing of the Djoker has not been a secret, but he just keeps validating it.

• I finally found a great bathing suit! In and out of the lake this summer, it’s a winner (not sponcon).

• The brilliant Rebecca Solnit on rest as resistance -

  

  Take refuge!
  Lisa