Jul
15
It is yet another steamy week here in Suburbiaville. It is uncomfortably humid and warm. This means that it will be freezing cold and rainy for the one week we have booked to go home to Nova Scotia for a visit, as well as teeming with mosquitoes, and there will be a coating of ice on the pool.
Le sigh.
Today, we will be going for our regular weekly playdate with friends, except today? We are going swimming. This is good and bad.
It is good, obviously, for the fact that we can beat the heat and humidity for a little while. I like this. It is also good because this is the one day of the week where I can sometimes have our SUV to drive. My almost-fifteen-year-old car no longer has functioning air conditioning — the car’s worth $1500, and it would cost that much to fix or replace the A/C, so that’s a big NO — so on days when it is very hot and we have to drive to visit our friends, BDH lets me take the truck and he takes my car.
He’s a good man. A good man, who is right now sweating and putt-putt-putting along on his way to work, deafened by 4×60 air conditioning.
But back to swimming. It is also good because That Baby loves the water. She loves to splash and paddle and jump. She loves to float on her back in a life jacket. Mind you, swimming lessons were months ago, a distant memory in Toddler Time, so perhaps she will get to the pool today and freak out and DEAR DOG WHAT IS THAT THING FULL OF WATER??? It’s hard to say. But I think she will have fun.
Now, it’s not all sunshine and skittles, this swimming thing. For one thing, this means I HAVE TO BE SEEN IN A SWIMSUIT. There comes a certain age where you figure that when you purchase a swimsuit, it should also come with a supply of protective goggles for all those around you who must be subjected to the horror of Middle Aged Woman In Bathing Suit.
I have reached that age. It’s like trying to pack twenty pounds of sausage in a five-pound bag.
Normally, it’s not so bad if you are going to be somewhere, like swimming lessons, where you are surrounded by people who are also mom-shaped and enduring the trauma of wearing a bathing suit when they really do not want to. But today, we will be around people we KNOW. People who I would rather only see me fully clothed from head to toe — possibly even in a parka to hide all the unfortunateness of my mid-life figure. But I can’t, so I will suck it up because my kid wants to swim.
The other unfortunate thing…
*****TMI ALERT! TMI ALERT!*****
*****LOOK AWAY, SENSITIVE TYPES!! THIS MEANS YOU!!*****
*****PROCEED WITH CAUTION!!! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!! *****
The other unfortunate thing about going out in public in a swimsuit, is that, as a woman, and in particular a Stay-at-Home Mom type of Woman, it involves a fair amount of *ahem* “Womanscaping”.
If you are a SAHM, some days you are lucky to have even put on clothes that didn’t have some sort of stain or food substance or boogers or whatever on it, let alone wear something nice. Showers are, some days, a distant yet pleasant dream. You get up and put on WHATEVER and stumble through your days.
So on days when you actually DO manage to get showered and shampooed and shiny clean, tending the Ladygardens is the last thing on your mind. So when faced with the prospect of wearing a swimsuit in public, it requires a level of awareness and preparation that requires digging into the distant long-ago reaches of your consciousness, when you used to be an Attractive and Social Human Being.
I mean, oh my DOG. You want me to WHAT??? WHERE??
It’s not for the faint of heart.
*****END TMI ALERT. YOU ARE SAFE NOW.*****
It’s a dodgy proposition, this going swimming business. I mean, I don’t even know if I remember how to swim. I might just land in the water and sink like a rock. A fat, spandex-encased, well-groomed rock.
But you do these things for your kids. Because you love them. And you hope they will remember, and choose a nice home to put you in when you are old.
One without a swimming pool, of course.
