Bathing Suits and Big Boobs
Daughter not like mother
Last week my seventeen-year-old daughter and I sat down to do one of our best-loved activities. After dinner one night we hunkered down at the dining room table with our favorite cheesy catalog — Venus. No matter how many times we cancel the catalog, Venus comes in the mail every few weeks. It has really ridiculous fashion — styles that might be common in other areas of the country but to us Pacific Northwesterners, the clothes on the models look like something you might see on showgirls at a country-western theme park.
The game we play is that we each have to choose one item on every page that we’d wear. We laugh and tease each other a lot, imagining her wearing those red shorts or me wearing the leopard print mu mu. It’s an easy connecting time, one I relish because it’s simple and playful, a time to suspend other conversations about school or chores or life. When all the pages in the catalog have been seen, we recycle the catalog and go our separate ways.
Looking at the catalog the other day my daughter commented on a bikini. “That’s not actually so bad,” she said, “I’d wear that.” It is incredibly rare that my daughter will let me have anything to do with her fashion choices. The Venus catalog happens to have a whole line of swimwear for women with big boobs which means that they make the suits in…
