At 41, I Had Not Got In The Water With My Kids In Three Summers

A note from a reader about the swimsuit set from a small Australian boutique that got her off the towel — no cover-up, no shapewear, and nothing to hold in.

Somewhere after the second baby I stopped getting in the water, and I want to be honest that it was never the water I had a problem with.

It was the ten minutes before and the ten minutes after. The walk from the towel down to the sea. Standing about in a swimsuit while everybody else is perfectly relaxed. The cover-up that has to come off at some point and then has to be found again in a hurry.

So I became the one who holds the bags and takes the photos. Three summers of sitting on the sand fully dressed, saying I was happy where I was, and meaning it a little less each time.

Three weeks ago my sister bought me a swimsuit set from Perth Boutique and flatly refused to take it back. I have been in the water four times since.

What it is

It is a two piece, but not the sort of two piece you are now picturing. The top is a loose, breezy tank with a scooped neck and a racerback, cut long and full so it drapes over the tummy and the hips rather than sitting against them. The bottom half is a pair of matching shorts that cover the upper thighs and the bottom properly, so there is no riding up and no adjusting as you stand.

It is quick drying and it breathes, and it moves when you move instead of gripping.

But the part that actually changed things for me is simpler than any of that.

From ten feet away it does not read as swimwear. It reads as a vest top and a pair of shorts.

The purple one, which is the one I wear most. There are five colours.

I did not want to be hidden. I wanted to stop being looked at while I got from the towel to the water. There is a difference, and this is the first thing I have owned that understood it.

What happened at Cottesloe

The first time I wore it was a Saturday morning at Cottesloe with the kids, early, before the car park fills up.

I walked from the car to the sand in it. That is the sentence I would like you to sit with for a moment, because three summers running I would have arrived in a dress and taken it off behind a towel like someone getting changed in a tent.

I did not think about it once. I got in the water. My seven year old was astonished, which tells you everything about how long it had been.

“Mum, you are actually coming in,” she said, as though she had caught me at something.

→ See the Sarah swimsuit set

What changed in three weeks

I was not trying to look twenty-five. After two babies and a decade of never quite getting round to it, you quietly lower the bar to presentable, then again to covered, and eventually to not going at all. What surprised me about this one is that it moved the bar back up without asking me to do a single thing first.

Three things I noticed, and I wrote them down because I knew I would want to remember.

1. It drapes instead of holding you in. There is no shapewear feeling, no compression panel, nothing squeezing. The top is cut full and simply falls past the middle. You are covered because of the shape of it, not because something is gripping you.

2. The shorts solve the standing up. Sitting down is never the problem. Standing up is. These cover the tops of the thighs and the bottom, so getting off a towel in front of people stopped being an event.

3. Two pieces is the practical answer. Anyone who has wrestled a wet one piece in a beach toilet with a child banging on the door already knows why. You can also wear the top with other shorts and the shorts with other tops, which I did not expect and now do constantly.

It dries fast enough that I have walked straight off the sand into the cafe on Marine Parade with two sandy kids and ordered coffee without changing, which is a small thing and also the entire point.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because it was the thing I was most suspicious of. Fifty-seven ninety-nine for a set that does all of that did not sound right to me. So I sat down and wrote out what I had actually spent on this problem over the years.

• A “tummy control” one piece I wore twice, $140
• The swim dress that floated up every single time, $110
• Three cover-ups, none of which solved anything, $75
• The Sarah set, $57.99

And underneath, in slightly larger letters, the only thing I could think to write. …three summers??

They are a small boutique selling directly, which is most of the answer, and the rest is that it is on sale. It is marked down from $153.00 to $57.99, which is sixty-two per cent off, and the sale is not running forever.

What I’d tell you if we were friends

If you were standing in my kitchen with a coffee and you asked me whether you should order one, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that if you have stopped getting in the water, it was almost certainly never about your body. It was about the swimwear, which is designed either to hide us or to hold us in, and both of those make you feel like a problem being managed. This does neither. It covers what you would like covered and then gets out of the way.

I would tell you to go by the size chart rather than by what you usually buy, because it is measured in centimetres on the product page and that is a far better guide than a number on a label. It runs from an AU 8 to an AU 18.

I would tell you that the purple is the one I reach for, that there are five colours, and that I have since ordered the black for exactly the reason you are thinking.

And I would tell you that delivery is free anywhere in Australia and there are thirty days to send it back, so the whole thing costs you nothing but the trouble of trying it on at home, which is the only mirror that has ever told me the truth anyway.

If you have, for longer than you would like to admit, been the one holding the bags and taking the photos, please do not let it be another summer.

The water is the same as it always was. It was only ever the ten minutes either side.

— Rachel