water log

Since I was a kid, I’ve spent my summers in and around various bodies of water. The local pool, the ocean, various Great Lakes and some not so great ones, the odd pond or river. For the first five or so years of my life, a wading pool, the kind made of hard plastic with a slide built in, plastic that cracks and splits in the heat of the sun and eventually scrapes a chubby limb or two. Do they still make them like that? They shouldn’t.

Over the summers, my chubby toddler limbs expanded into a soft and generous adolescent belly and eventual fat adult body, and as my corporeal form took shape in it’s various iterations, the time spent in and around the water started to collect a lot of emotional detritus, similar to the type that collected at the surface of my formative wading pool, a scuzzy slurry of dead bugs and soggy twigs and emulsified sunscreen. The summer stew floating at the top of my childhood pool used to make me panic and cry if it touched me — and if I wasn’t careful, the emotional detritus of fat girl summer could make me panic and cry, too. Inhabiting your body with ease is hard enough when you’re fat, regardless of the season — but summer asks us all to be wet and sticky, overheated and chafing. Perhaps most difficult of all, it asks us to be exposed, both to ourselves and to the general public.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of my water-related memories vary from “not great” to “surprised they haven’t yet come up in therapy.” The moment I realized I didn’t look like other girls in my bathing suit. The first time I felt compelled to drape a towel over my entire body at the pool in 90 degree weather, almost vomiting from the trapped heat. The time(s) I wore a cardigan and/or jeans to the beach. The time a bunch of girls who’d previously bullied me pretended to include me in a “breath-holding contest,” only to hold my head under water until I’d nearly blacked out. Hiding in the bathroom at day camp to eat my lunch because the sight of a fat 11-year-old munching a mushy turkey sandwich in a swimsuit was enough to send a group of fuckhead fellow day campers into a tailspin. Being assured by a pimply 17-year-old sleepaway camp counselor that he’d lift all swimmers back onto a high floating doc in the middle of the lake after we jumped in, only for him to have to call in backup when my turn came around, then having the counselor ask “Jeez, how much do you weigh?” in front of at least 12 shivering children who’d already started forming their campfire punchlines about what happened at swimming class that day.

I know it’s fucked up, but I’m laughing as I’m writing this. Not just at the thought of some loser teen who nicknamed himself Neptune attempting to hoist my rotund bod onto a floating dock somewhere in central Ohio, though the fact that I was also taller than him at 10 is, in fact, hilarious. Of course, at the time it was very much not hilarious — that experience, along with all the others, planted hearty seeds of summer dread that would follow me into adulthood. What really makes me laugh is thinking about the water-logged heroine at the heart of the story, humiliated and anxiety-ridden with her swimsuit wedged all the way up her ass. It’s not her pain that tickles me — of course not. It’s the fact that despite all of the discomfort she’ll feel over the summers, all of the shame and anxiety and judgment she’ll absorb from herself and the people around her, she somehow never stops jumping into the water like she’s entitled to be there, exposed and imperfect and free. Her time in the water will never be graceful, there’s always some form of muck to avoid, and depending on her level of enthusiasm, sometimes it ends up up hurting a little. But for all those early summers, she never stopped hurling her impressive mass into the brine, surfacing with a sputter and a cough without a fuck to give.

Tell me your fat kid summer stories in the comments, surely some of you had your own Neptune.