Why I Wore a Bikini

Body image is not something that has ever been a place of ease for me. I have struggled for a long time to come to terms with my body, its shape, its ways of living and moving and being. I'm obviously not alone in this. Rachel Kramer Bussel writes brilliantly about the ways that self image is a constant shifting challenge (ads may make this page NSFW) here, and like so many other women, I can see myself in her words. And yet I share her desire to be more fully and continually loving of myself.

So I wore a bikini on the Fourth of July.

I have a perfectly adorable maternity suit that I could have worn. But I've worn it several times to sit out on my back porch and get sun, and I wanted different tan lines (you know, so that those judgy midwives don't refuse to help me give birth because I have bad tan lines). So the bikini was the result of a good five minutes of staring at my naked pregnant body in the mirror, another good five minutes sobbing while sitting on the floor about how I feel totally not myself and unattractive and hate that I can't just love myself the way I look, and then a moment of "Screw this, it's a family party, and you don't actually look bad."

But getting to that last moment, the "screw this" that I used to embody with so little effort, was hard. Harder than the ten minutes it actually took.

I've spent years learning about cultural norms, especially cultural norms about gender and bodies, and challenging them in my personal and professional life. I still don't know whether I'm going to manage to finish and successfully defend my dissertation, but so much about disability studies has changed my understanding of my body and bodies in general. And I truly believe that those changes are for the better. I want to get back to believing them, embodying them. It's hard. I've never felt less queer, more normative, and still somehow more vulnerable than I do now. It's as if being pregnant has erased much of the identity I crafted and loved for myself previously. And that, combined with residual feelings of being betrayed by my body for being pregnant at all, leaves me feeling seriously out of place.

So I stepped up to the "Screw this" plate, pulled on a pair of boy-cut bottoms (and tugged them down below the bump) and a top that would give me different tan lines, then got dressed and went to the party. I have never been tall and thin. At best, I was wicked curvy. But there's something tremendously unsettling about going from 5'2", 38-28-40 to 5'2", 42-33.5-41.5, even knowing that it's because I'm growing this thing that will become my child. I don't expect to look like the cover of a pregnancy magazine any more than I'd ever expect to look like something on the cover of any other magazine. Not going to happen. But I've gone from

to 

(20 weeks, please forgive the bad lighting and mirror desperately in need of cleaning)

to

(July 5, which doesn't look much different to July 4, except I am wearing my comparison shirt and forgot to cut my head out of the picture)

I've come to the conclusion that I'm carrying low and all in front, which means that, given my hips and waistline, I am now shaped like an ancient fertility statue with a half-inflated basketball in her tummy:

(Again, taken today. Clean mirror, funny face.)

It's odd. It's disconcerting. It's where I am now, and after flashing my stomach yesterday, it's a place in which I can be comfortable. Which is not to say that in another month, when my uterus will actually be the size of a soccer ball, I will be able to maintain that comfort. But I'm back to feeling as if I should not, cannot, be bound by the cultural norms that would demand anorexia in order to participate, and I hope to find ways to keep this acceptance even as my body continues to change.