Covert Mom: Pink Cadillac

By Mariah Mottley

Swimsuit season is upon us, and for those women raised in the shadow of body-shaming matriarchs, the prospect of what to wear at the beach is stressful enough to produce a fight-or-flight response.

As the mother of two daughters, my singular goal is to model body positivity for them. The hardest question when parenting is this: How do we take the broken parts of ourselves and use them to make sure our kids grow up whole? How do you teach something you don’t know?
I’ll tell you. You fake it.

My grandmother once told me that if I grew up to have fabulous legs, she would give me her gold anklet.
“What if I don’t grow up to have fabulous legs?” I asked. “Won’t you give it to me anyway?”

I was her only granddaughter, and unclear on the limits of the term ‘fabulous.’ She didn’t answer, just put on lipstick and changed the subject. I inspected my legs many times over the years, but never got the anklet.

My grandmother was 5-11 and dyed her hair platinum blonde. She called everyone ‘darling’ and loved talking about the time she was mistaken for Grace Kelly at Kennedy Airport. She was the first female editor of Bride and Home magazine, and the legacy she left of having fabulous legs did her daughters more harm than good. Appearances were paramount.

My mother was a veteran of crash diets, weight-loss pills and using nicotine to keep her appetite in check. She hated her body, but wanted me to like mine. Since we had the same one, she was often stymied in her efforts. My aunt had no such compunctions. When I was six weeks postpartum, and six months past my mother’s death, she asked me what I was planning on doing about my weight. She said nothing about how beautiful the baby was or how proud my mother would have been of me. Just, what was I going to do about my weight? I cried for days, devastated. I had craved motherly approval so badly and had been backhanded instead.

Finally, I looked at the little baby in my arms and I decided enough was enough with the shame. Here’s the thing about bad relatives: They can’t help it.

My aunt didn’t have the tools to love herself, thanks to the lady with the fabulous legs. She didn’t have anything to pass on to me other than criticism. Nope, I thought, smiling at my daughter, with her huge cheeks, and round dimpled thighs. My mother may have been dead, but she had loved me right while she was alive. I knew what it felt like.
“We’re going to come up with a better way,” I told the baby.

After that, I took every opportunity I could to identify situations where body shaming could become an issue, where I might be blindsided by my upbringing. Swimsuit season was prime territory.

If your strategy for dealing with this trauma is flight, Land’s End can help. Click on their ‘Swim Solutions’ link to search suits by the body problems they fix. There is a checklist, and the options are: Flatten tummy, full body slimming, minimize bust, conceal thighs, create curves, and the catchall, camouflaging.

The names of the swimsuits are equally solutionary. The Plus Size Tummy Control Flounce Mini promised to minimize everything, but I knew at a glance that the Slender Grecian One Piece, in DD+ was the one for the bodies in my family. We are busty, and in need of waist definition.

I knew that, but I didn’t buy that swimsuit. I was done apologizing. I switched from flight to fight in the interest of my daughters. Life is too short to allow yourself to be minimized.

Instead, I bought a retro-inspired swimsuit from Unique Vintage, a company that wants everyone to look like a pinup girl. Then I wore it until it felt normal, which only took three years. I had to unlearn what I knew, which was that I didn’t have a bikini body. My girls don’t need to see me seeking swim solutions, they need to see me romping with them in polka dots, stretch marks and all.

You get to choose which legacy to leave your family. I decided to ditch everything but the word ‘fabulous.’ We’re keeping that.
– – –
Originally from Manhattan, Mariah was educated in Massachusetts, Montana and Texas, often by failure. She lives with her husband and three children in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Mariah can be reached at mariah@mariahmottley.com.