We went to Walla Walla this weekend, and one of the things that happened was that we went to WalMart.  I had two missions:  one was to get The Boy some longer pants, as he just went through a growth spurt that caused his ankles to shoot out of the bottoms of his size 7 jeans and two was to get some Mommy underwear, because when I was trying to pack 2 pairs of underwear, I only had one left.  There was a secret third mission, which was to see if they had any Mommy bathing suits that seemed more likely to fit than what they had on offer at Target.

It was largely a success.  I grabbed some jeans and some camo cargo pants with adjustable waist, which is good, because the boy gets taller and taller, but not at all wider.  I also managed to grab some Mommy underwear both in Mommy’s underwear size and in Mommy’s dress size, because it said something about dress size right on the package.  It turns out that when Mommy buys underwear aligned to her dress size rather than to her butt size, she gets underwear that could power a small sailboat.  Thank God WalMart has generous return policies.

But I also grabbed some items to fulfill my secret third mission.  I didn’t bother trying them on, because trying on swim suits in the post-kid era is mostly an exercise in humility, or more accurately, humiliation.  See, the underwear that aligned to my dress size was size 14, and that is FAR bigger than is generally acceptable in this society.  I’m either paying a premium to Lane Bryant, who has a business model centered around catering to women who are tired of being humiliated in the dressing room and are therefore willing to pay $80 for a pair of jeans that doesn’t make them actively feel bad about themselves, or I’m getting something reasonably priced from Target, who views anything over a size 10 as “inclusive sizing” and fits like crap, because really, at 14, you’re a charity case for swimwear.  But this weekend, I went to WalMart, where there were a ton of swim suits offered in a ton of sizes, that went up to multi-X.  I only needed one of the X’es, but I’m so habituated to feeling humiliation in the dressing room that I just grabbed a couple of things that looked like they might be my style and resolving to return them if they were in fact, awful.

But here’s the thing:  they weren’t.  It’s like I’d been shopping at a place where women over a size 10 were a part of their core demographic, like we were important to them.  Like we weren’t some sort of stretch goal that they could check off on their review.  Like I was an actual PERSON that they stocked actual options for.  WalMart gets a lot of trash talk around here, but shopping at a place where I’m neither a niche market nor a stretch goal is pretty empowering.

This has been a weekend of receiving encouragement from the universe.  Right after I bought my surprisingly fun swim suits from WalMart, I started seeing this graphic floating around Facebook.  I looked for the original ScaryMommy post to attribute it to here, but I couldn’t find it, so here’s the copy I have.  Find your power.  Be who you are.