Turn to the Left

As many of you know, my only kiddo - a/k/a The Boy - leaves this week for college.  He’s psyched for it, and somehow his excitement seems to have translated into a penchant for dressing like Hunter S. Thompson:

I love it.

I love it, but I try not to say too much about it.  Parental endorsement of fashion is presumably the last thing an 18 year old kid wants.

Still, between you, me and the blogosphere, I love it just as I love seeing kids with pink or blue or green hair - and I love that there seem to be so many of them now.  I love seeing teens with fearless fashion sense and a creative, offbeat outlook on life.  I love that, at least in some corners of the world, our culture seems to be shifting in a way that allows young people to have fun expressing who they are.

As a teenager, I wanted desperately to let my freak flag fly.  My mother bought me khakis and Keds.  I bought combat boots and lace tights.  Trying to leave the house in my preferred attire was like trying to convince Sarah Palin that Hillary should be our next President.

Mom, horrified:  “You can’t leave the house like that!  You look like that crazy Madonna person.  What will your teachers think?”

Dad, stern:  “You’re ruining your life.  Do you want to be a degenerate?”

I thought this was kind of funny coming from a guy who was a fan of David Bowie and Lou Reed, but clearly what was acceptable in rock star fashion was not acceptable in suburbia.  What I didn’t get was why.  I just wanted to wear combat boots and lace tights.  Maybe occasionally use makeup to turn my massive eyebrows into something deliberately severe, a la Siouxie and the Banshees.  What did any of that have to do with my teachers?  Did I ever say anything about their horrific fashion sense?  Those polyester pant suits and orthopedic shoes seemed to me far more likely to carry one down the road to ruin than the occasional blue streak in my hair.

But damn, folks love to fixate on the superficial.

If I had a nickel for every time I was told to do the very opposite of what I wanted to do - of what felt natural to me - well, I’d have a shitload of nickels.  And for what?  I spent my youth fearful of exploring, constantly told to zip my lip, change my clothes, fix my hair, be mindful of what my teachers, my grandparents, the neighbors might think.  That limiting mindset stuck with me for far too long.  I am 40 years old and just now beginning to live the life I’ve always imagined.

It makes me gleefully happy to see so many young people encouraged to have fewer hang-ups and secrets, and more awesome, life-building experiences.

My words of wisdom?

Wear what you want to wear.

Say what you want to say.

Stop worrying about the superficial stuff and go do fabulous things.

Because our world gets better every time we stop worrying about what the neighbors might think…and just get off our asses and make the neighborhood a better place.

www.kcwilder50ways.com

Now give a listen to my new favorite groove: ‘Secrets’ by Mary Lambert.  If this earworm doesn’t make you smile, check your pulse.

Demons

I was shocked and saddened to hear of Robin Williams' death, an apparent suicide.

The trouble with celebrity is that it makes us feel we know people.

Complete strangers?  Somehow we feel we know them.  The omniscience of their work makes us feel a sense of familiarity, of kinship.

And then, because they are human - and because we don’t really know them - they do something that catches us utterly off-guard.

Robin Williams was the funny man.  He was Mork from Ork.  Peter Pan.  Mrs. Doubtfire.  His stand-up routines were foul-mouthed brilliance.  In many of the darker moments in my own life, he made me laugh when I wanted to cry.

I met my friend Cathy - Cat Woman, as I called her - in 1992.  We were neighbors at first, then roommates for a while.  Cat was an artist, musician, and general three-ring circus.  We rigged up her microphone and PA system for karaoke nights in our house.  We sang even if her dog Debbie was our only audience.  We had no money, so we crashed local art openings and wine tastings as an alternative to dinners out.  Cat ruined two of my blenders making paper.  She atoned with jewelry and hair clips she handmade for me.

When my son was born, Cat became his honorary aunt.  She taught him to play piano.  She painted his friends’ faces at his birthday parties.  Cat was a spitfire, and the kids loved her.  She was the life of any party.

She battled her demons, though.  For all the years I’d known her, we’d discussed this openly.  Cat was bipolar.  I suffered from depression.  We compared our afflictions, weighed the pros and cons of different treatments.  On a little road trip in 2007 - to see Gordon Lightfoot in New York (I know; don’t hate) - she seemed especially sure she’d beaten her demons.  I was glad.  Back in our hotel room after the concert, we watched Man of the Year.  Robin Williams starred as a political satirist who wins the Presidency thanks to a computer-voting glitch.  Cat dozed off just before the end of the film.  She was laughing one minute, sleeping the next.  Just like old times at the house we’d shared years earlier.

In November of 2009, Cat and I chatted on the phone for nearly two hours.  Her demons had returned earlier that year, and she’d moved away from New England to live with family.  I missed her, but she sounded good.  Better.   She promised to send her new mailing address for my Christmas card list.

It never came.

In time, my attempts to track down Cat’s address for my Christmas mailing list became something more fraught.  Her voice mail box was full.  Then there was a recording saying the line had been disconnected.  Email went unanswered.  I tried to remember her sisters’ married names.  I called our mutual friends and learned that no one else had heard from Cat in a while.  A sinking feeling grew in the pit of my stomach.

It was spring before I learned what had happened.  A mutual friend called, and the tone of his voice alone told me that Cat was gone.  I waited for the details: she’d killed herself in December.  On some level, I wasn’t surprised, yet I was literally brought to my knees.  One of my very best friends was gone.  There was no undoing this.

I thought, then, of all the times she’d called me in despair.  She’d let me talk her down from so many ledges over the years.

Why couldn’t she have let me talk her down from just one more?

I took a pickaxe and shovels to the front of my lawn.  I hacked and dug and crawled on my hands and knees.  In a strange whirl of sadness and anger, I made a garden where there was none.  I planted flowers for Cat and waited to feel better.  Eventually, I built a Little Free Library in her memory and anchored it in the garden, thinking how she would love something so grassroots and community-minded.

You know what I really wanted, though?

I wanted my friend back.

Ultimately, I realized that what my friend wanted was simply an end to her pain.  She wanted a better life, but she couldn’t find one in the skin she was in.  Whether she found peace in the end, I will never know.

What I know is this:

Cat was a bright, shining star.  She was blessed with talent and passion and kindness.

Much as it seems the celebrity Robin Williams was.

I didn’t know him.  Most likely, neither did you.  He wore different costumes, became different characters.  Maybe he was as uncomfortable in his own skin as my friend Cat was in hers.

Now, for his family and friends and those truly who knew the man behind all the guises and humor, the pain begins.  My prayers go out to them.

Rest in peace, Mr. Williams.

{And please, if you or someone you love is battling demons of their own, seek help.  And keep seeking help.  I’ve provided a link to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention here, but there are plenty of other options.  Reach out.}

www.kcwilder50ways.com

The Big D

There’s a joke that goes something like this:

Why is divorce so expensive?

Because it’s worth it.

Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

Yesterday was the longest, strangest day of my life.

I was wearing the dress I’d intended to wear to my wedding rehearsal dinner three years prior.  You know - the dinner that was canceled because Hurricane Irene forced us to bump the whole carefully-planned event up by 36 hours?  Anyway…

Yesterday, I had to face a courtroom full of strangers and answer questions about my marriage and how it all went fabulously to shit.  I suppose that’s not exactly how my attorney phrased it, but that’s what I heard.  Immediately, my mind got stuck on the idea that I didn’t feel it all went fabulously to shit.  I felt that most of the time it was all pretty damn good - but something at the core of it went quietly, insidiously to shit.  Did I not get to explain that?  Should these voyeurs not at least be required to hear the full story?

It seemed not.

Worst of all, there was The Hubby - very, very soon to be The Ex Hubby - sitting next to his lawyer, somehow looking to me just like he did on our wedding day.  Handsome and stoic and uncomfortable.

I lost it.

In front of all those strangers, I dissolved into a shaking, blubbering mass of jelly.  I had two clear thoughts: one was a wish for instant death, the other was that I must certainly already be brain dead, having applied eye makeup that morning.  I looked like this:

"Do you need time?"  the judge asked.

A voice barked sharply:  “No.  I need this to be over.”

It was me.

Snapping at the judge.

Luckily, it seems if you are forty-ish, wearing rumpled Ann Taylor, flapping your hands like a deranged bird and sending mascara down your face in rivulets reminiscent of Courtney Love at Kurt Cobain’s funeral (or, OK, Courtney Love on a good day), you get a pass on some things, even in court.

Ultimately, the divorce was granted, and The Ex (get used to his new title with me) and I did what any newly-divorced couple would do.

We went fishing.

Yeah.  Not kidding.  I kind of feel like when it comes to the whole Conscious Uncoupling thing, I out-Gwyneth-ed Gwyneth Paltrow on this one.

We went fishing.

With no children - named after fruit or otherwise - we still decided to at least try to replace a negative experience with a positive one.  We went out on the boat (his boat, by court decree) and drank beer (his beer) and cast lines into the water.  The fish never bothered us.

At some point, it began to irritate me that we were out on the water enjoying a gorgeous summer day as we had so many, many times before.  As if we hadn’t just been granted an “absolute divorce” by one stranger in a room full of them.  Seven years together.  Seven months apart.  One hour and fifty-three minutes in family court, and it was done.  I tried talking politics, hoping for an argument that would remind me of why we separated in the first place.  But The Ex wasn’t taking the bait any more than the fish were.

So we just took the boat out into the chop outside the harbor.  I love choppy seas.  I always want to go as fast as possible, while The Ex generally prefers to take it slow.

"Go fast," I said.

The man who wouldn’t look at me in court turned to me and smiled.  It was the thinnest, saddest smile at first, but it grew.  He leaned on the throttle and aimed into the whitecaps.

And I felt the smile creep back onto my face.

In the wake of my divorce, this much I know:

• Silence is toxic to marriage.
• So is valuing the opinions of others over those of your spouse.
• The wolf allegory is true: whichever one you feed will win.
• Pop music is also true: sometimes love just ain’t enough.
• A man who didn’t understand me worked hard at providing me with the things he thought I needed to be happy.  (That’s something.)
• I did the same for him.  (I hope he feels that’s something.)
• There is no substitute for genuine understanding and communication.
• The whole “tis better to have loved and lost…” thing is true.  You only understand that when you are hollowed-out and broken.

                        But still grateful.

www.kcwilder50ways.com

Game On

It was the kind of Saturday I would generally spend at the beach: sunny, mid 80’s, clear blue skies.  Perfect.

Instead, I was wearing camouflage, driving a car full of teenagers, listening to Tenacious D and heading for a paintball facility an hour north of any place where the surf laps at the sand.

Yep.

Paintball.

Me.

Ms. Peace-Love-Harmony-and-Kate Spade.

This was a deal I’d been suckered into by The Sibs.  I’m the oldest of seven kids.  Five of us are “adults.”  We’ve got spouses and kids.  We’re a wild, crazy, diverse bunch, and we’ve been known to undertake a wild, crazy and diverse assortment of activities.

The paintball outing had been suggested by the brother-in-law we affectionately call Dodo.  (His real name is Dylan.  And yes, now you know something about how affection works in my family.)  My son - a/k/a The Boy - leaves for college next month, and Dylan suggested a paintball outing might be a fun activity for a few of the guys and The Boy before his departure.  My sisters and I bristled at the implicit exclusion of us females.  After all, this was an opportunity to purchase cute camo outfits and strike Charlie’s Angels poses, no?  We were IN!

We arrived at P&L Paintball ready to roll.  Dylan had made a special tee shirt for The Boy: neon yellow with a red bullseye on both the front and back.  The Boy good-naturedly put it on.  We paid the fee, claimed massive boxes of paintballs, and headed out to the field where we’d collect our weapons and helmets.

This was when it became clear we were in over our heads.

The place was massive.  Acres of sprawling fields and woods full of elaborate gaming areas lay before us.  There was a Wild West-style ghost town, a dystopian arrangement of towers and satellite dishes and even the remnants of an airplane, a stark field full of paint splattered cable spools.

And then there were the people.  For starters, there were so damn many of them!  Far more paintball enthusiasts than I ever would have imagined existed in one small corner of Massachusetts.  And holy crap, the gear they had!  Fancy camouflage suits and vests. Helmets with skulls on them.  Shiny, space-age-looking paintball guns.  They had teams and strategies.  One guy was roughly the size of Andre the Giant.  He was dressed in full camouflage and combat boots and looked as though he took it all very, very seriously.

We hadn’t even started the game, and we’d accomplished the family-bonding mission.  We all moved closer to one another.

"I think we made a mistake," one of my sisters-in-law said.

I nodded.

"What did they say the fee was for us to play as our own group?" I asked quietly.  "You know - where they keep us away from the, um…general population?  I’ll pay the fee."

"Don’t be a wuss," my brother Mo said.

No one calls me a wuss.

And so it was game on.

The first game was played in the dystopian landscape.  I quickly realized I had nothing to fear where paintball hits were concerned.  Wearing long sleeves, pants, and a helmet - all while toting a surprisingly heavy paintball gun and running in the blazing sun from the cover of one shelter to the next  - I was sweating so profusely you’d have thought I’d jumped in a swimming pool.  Clearly I was going to pass out before anyone shot me.

And then I was hit.

When you’re loading paintballs into a gun, they look kind of cute and fun, sort of like squishy little marbles.  They’re deceptive.  Let me tell you: those little fuckers sting.

The first one hit me on my right wrist.  While I was shaking my arm and cursing, completely oblivious to the game, I took a paintball to the ribs.

"Get down," someone said firmly, and I obediently dropped behind a barricade just as a barrage of paintball fire hit.

I looked over.  It was the Giant.

My hero.

From there on out, I tried to stick with him.  If nothing else, I figured he made a great human shield.

In time, though, I realized I was having fun.  I liked the challenge of trying to advance on the course, running and diving instead of hiding at the back of the pack.  The paintballs didn’t seem to sting quite so much after the first few hits (though the welts I’d have later would tell a different story).

In our final game, I was huddled behind a cable spool, trying to figure out if I could make it safely to the next shelter.

"Excuse me, ma’am?" a voice said.  It was one of the team-and-strategy guys who’d impressed me all afternoon.  "There’s only one shooter in the tower now.  If you want to advance, I’ve got you covered."

I DID want to advance!  And how about that?  A hardcore paintball guy had me covered!  They were letting me play their reindeer games!

I ran, dove for cover.

When it was game over, my family and I all chatted away with the folks around us as we shed our gear, took pictures, showed off battle scars.  I was sweaty, filthy and sore.

I was also asking the Giant where I could get a paintball gun and vest like his.

www.kcwilder50ways.com

My naive pre-paintball selfie…

AFTER the fun and games...

With The Boy and his tee.  Guess who took the least hits of anyone in our group?

Good Girls, Bad Girls, and the F-Word

If you’ve read my novel Fifty Ways to Leave Your Husband, you know that (1) there’s a fair amount of sex in it (it’s not for nothing that my mother refers to it as “Karen’s sex book”), and (2) the sidekick steals the show.  Tamara is the BFF we all want: fun, vivacious, loyal, nuttier than squirrel shit, and with a MOUTH.  She drops F-bombs like Margaret Cho on speed.

Tamara brings to mind one of my favorite freedoms:

Freedom of the sort of expression that would have earned you a bar of soap in the mouth as a kid.

Confession time: I love to say, “Fuck.”  I think, properly used, it’s one of the very best words in the English language.  And I use it - properly, of course - quite a bit.

To be clear, I’m not tossing the F-word around during work hours or in the presence of small children.  I don’t break it out at cocktail parties or Christmas dinner.  Everything has its place.  I get it.

I also get that I’m maybe not quite the sort of girl you’d expect to be so fond of the F-word.  Take a look at my promo pics.  I look like a Good Girl, don’t I?  

But here and now, I’d like to divest myself of the Good Girl label.  I’d like to do what my protagonist Eve does and ditch the Good Girl suit of armor - and all the heavy fucking baggage that comes with it.

I’d like you to do the same.

Because here’s the thing…

Being a Good Girl has no real value.  In fact, I think the label does a whole lot of harm.  Because if there are Good Girls, there are Bad Girls, too.  And heaven knows, we’ve got a whole slew of words for that kind of girl.

A couple of days ago I was reading a great article by Melissa Gira Grant entitled, There Is No Such Thing as a Slut.  “Sluts take up more space in our imagination than in anyone’s bed,” she writes.  More fully to the point, she illustrates the ways sluttiness is a myth - a “form of sexual privilege” - and perhaps worst of all, the way we women use the term/concept to leverage our power against one another, all the while foolishly undermining our own goals.

Someone like me, for example - white, middle class, able to determine on the basis of a lifetime of social schooling how to dress and when to bite one’s tongue - might come across as a Good Girl, while someone from a lower-class background or an unestablished ethnic minority might lack the social grooming to dress and speak so as to avoid unwanted labels.  Yet there may be absolutely no correlation between our public presentation and our sexual promiscuity.

In fact, statistics indicate otherwise.  Statistically, Good Girls know they can get away with more - and therefore, they do.

(I’ve got you all thinking naughty thoughts about me now, haven’t I?  Oh, go on…)

In the fictional world of my novel, Eve appears to be the Good Girl, while Tamara seems the foul-mouthed hussy.  But when one examines the situation more fully - (spoiler alert!) - Eve is out on the beach fucking a stranger while Tamara is home with her husband and kids - we get a better picture of how irrelevant labels truly are.

In my recent body-issues post, The Size of It, I suggested that we women could literally change the world for our daughters and granddaughters if we just were more careful about how we speak about our self-image.

I think the same is true here.    

My favorite blogs, books, films and Netflix fare celebrate and explore female experience with humor, an unflinching eye, and often a foul, foul tongue.  These writers and artists are not your stereotypical Good Girls.

They’re much better than that.  

That said, join me in bidding farewell to those polarizing, useless myths: the Slut and the Good Girl.  I’ll leave you with a few fun links from ladies who kick ass, talk and write sex, and yes, drop the occasional F-bomb.

I fucking love them.

Aussa Lorens redefines talking dirty in bed.

Shannon Bradley-Colleary talks about hot married sex (no, it’s not an oxymoron…or a misprint).

And Wanda Sykes’ Detachable Pussy routine remains my very favorite, funny-as-hell way to unload all that female baggage.

www.kcwilder50ways.com

The Unicorn at the Dog Beach

He was tall, pale, and soft around the middle in that endearing way that forty-something married-with-children men tend to be.

He was wearing the very same swim trunks as every other father of small kids there at the beach - the ones stocked by Marshall’s within easy reach of wives headed to the checkout.

He’d expertly wheeled a cart loaded tidily with L.L. Bean bags and sand toys and umbrellas and chairs, staked out his patch of beach, and begun to unpack.  Then he stopped, dropped everything, and chased after his small son - a boy of about 3 or 4 years old, I’d guess.

"Hey, buddy," he said, corralling the kid under the umbrella.  "Gotta get sunscreen on first, right?"

He slathered the boy with sunscreen, then secured a hat on his little blonde head.  He sent him off with a playful pat on the tush.

"Why don’t you take that shovel and start on our castle," he suggested.  "I’ll be over to help in a minute."

Ladies, he had my attention.

And apparently I wasn’t subtle about it, because - to my horror - he addressed me.

"Oh, I’m so sorry," he said.  "We didn’t mean to disturb you.  We’ll try to keep it down."

Yup.  Courteous, too.

I waved off his apology and stuck my nose into a book.

I couldn’t help but keep my antennae tuned in to the activity at the beach blanket next to mine, though.  This guy set up camp like a pro.  He pitched in on sand castle construction helpfully.  He addressed his son with nonchalance and respect as a variety of issues arose.

"No, no - you shouldn’t put that in your nose."

"Well, if you really need to poop, we’ll go to the potty.  Only doggies can go on the beach."

"Sure we can have lunch.  Let’s just go wash our hands first, okay, buddy?"

This was something I had missed out on as a single mother.  This variety of man amazed me by his mere existence.  And I knew from my girlfriends who were married with small children that they were all too rare.  Far too many fathers out there failed to notice objects going into little noses until emergency room extraction was required.  They thought all the world was a bathroom.  And washing hands before eating?  Good luck getting the dads to do it, never mind their offspring.

This guy was a FIND.

And clearly, I was staring.

As he settled his son into a beach chair and carefully unwrapped the little guy’s sandwich, he struck up a conversation with me.  He was probably trying to ascertain that I wasn’t a loony about to steal his small child or boil his rabbit, but whatever.  It was a nice conversation.  I learned that his wife was home with their 3-week old baby, which only endeared the guy to me more.  He understood that his wife needed a break!  That she needed time alone with her new baby!  

Then he told me his mother had come to help.

Aha!  I’d discovered it!  His fatal flaw!  His poor wife was stuck home with the mother-in-law.  She was probably wishing for a natural disaster to put an end to her “help.”

"Will she stay long?" I asked sweetly.

"Oh no," Perfect Dad said emphatically.  "My mother doesn’t like to impose.  She’ll just do some laundry, look after the baby a bit so my wife can take a nap, and then head home."

A MIL who didn’t want to impose?  Dear lord, even she was perfect.

"Well," I said wistfully.  "I’ll let you get back to your beach time with your son.  Congratulations."

And then, as father and son sat nibbling apples, their profiles and mannerisms so similar I nearly laughed, I went back to my book.

With - truly - a little bit of a crush.  And the sense that I’d seen something not unlike a unicorn.

The Size of It

It was like one of those nightmares where you wake up naked in public, only worse.

Because it was real.

I was in a department store fitting room.

Trying on swimsuits.

The first thought that came to me was the same one I have every time I enter a fitting room. What the hell is up with the fluorescent lighting?  Don’t they realize women would buy far more if they weren’t looking at themselves in the least-flattering light possible?  Why has no one in marketing figured out that soft lighting - and heck, maybe a drink or two - would make sales of women’s clothing (especially swim suits) positively soar?

Sadly, it was in the absence of such a marketing epiphany or kindness to shoppers that I found myself trying on tiny swaths of Spandex in a brightly-lit cubicle.  There was something called a “Miracle Suit,” which I decided was because it’s a miracle if you can breathe while wearing it.  There was a sports suit that gave me an alarming case of monoboob.  There were a half-dozen tankinis, each of which fit on either the bottom or the top, but never all over.

As I agonized over the way the latest suit failed to conceal my squishy middle, I heard a voice from the other side of the door, a fellow shopper in distress at the communal 3-way mirrors.

"I can’t possibly go out in this!" she cried.  "I’m so fat.  Look at these rolls!”

I admit it.  I left the safety of my fitting room and ventured out, pretending to want a look in the 3-way mirrors.  What I really wanted was to commiserate with this other poor soul, to have a laugh or two about how swimsuits are just not kind to women’s bodies.

What I found at the mirrors stopped me in my tracks.  A pretty girl of about 15 or 16, slim by anyone’s definition, grabbing at her middle and scowling at her reflection.  I was afraid she was going to remove skin, pulling on herself that way.  The “rolls” she spoke of were nonexistent.

I wanted to go over and tell her she’s beautiful just as she is.  I wanted to lift my tankini top and show her what rolls really look like.  Luckily, my brain kicked in and I realized pushing my bare flesh and compliments at a minor in a dressing room would likely end in arrest.  I slunk back to my fitting room.

But the incident stayed with me.  We females are so damn critical of our bodies.  Sure, we’re taught to be that way.  There’s no escaping the messages in society that tell us thin is better, sexy trumps smart.  But the bottom line is that we have to start being better to ourselves.  We have to stop beating ourselves up.

I was bulimic in my late teens and early twenties.  I have too many friends and relatives who have suffered from eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, and other body issues.  A very dear young friend of mine nearly lost her battle with anorexia, but has worked tirelessly to get well.

Ladies, we can end this bullshit one thought and one word at a time.

As you may know from earlier posts, I love being outdoors and active.  I “tortoise along” in road races and sprint triathlons.  One thing I’ve noticed at every race I’ve ever participated in is the wide variety of female body types competing.  I’ve seen every shape, size and age imaginable cross the finish line.  And you know what?  You truly cannot judge these books by their covers.  I’ve been left in the dust by women twice my size.

Which got me thinking: what if we measured our bodies not by how they compare to some airbrushed ideal, but by how much they do for us?  What if we thanked our bodies for the children they’ve carried, the miles they’ve run, the work they’ve accomplished?

What if we also made it our mission as women to support each other, no matter what?  At times, I’ve been called, “Skinny Minnie,” told I had no right to complain about body issues.  The intention may have been good, but I still felt the sting of judgment.  And that’s the sting that leads to trouble, no matter what the size tag on your jeans may say.

What if we made sure our daughters and granddaughters never heard us judge ourselves or one another on the basis of something as foolish and variable as our physical body?

Yeah, I’ve got a squishy middle.  I could change that.  More salads, less chardonnay.  More planks and push-ups, less hours at the computer.  More long runs, less time with toes in the sand and a beer in hand.

Or I could just find a swimsuit that gives my squishy middle a little more breathing room.

Which I did.

Via online order.

It looks great in the gentle, natural light at home.

And when I’m at the beach or on my SUP board?

I’m having too much damn fun to care what I look like.

www.kcwilder50ways.com

Want to feel better about your body right now?  Check out the Love Your Body Now Project.

And for a fun little reminder about the most important things you can apply before leaving the house, watch this awesome video.

{And PLEASE - if you are suffering from an eating disorder or body issues that are greatly affecting your life, seek professional help.  It works.  Your happiness is worth it!}