I Bought The Bikini
By: Kyla Kelley
Tags: Friendship, Sexuality And Religion, Postpartum, Body Image, Self Love

I Bought The Bikini

Photo by Monika Kozub on Unsplash

I am actually, really, truly, happy, for the first time in what feels like forever.

Maybe ever.

I am getting sane.

I am getting righted with the truth.

I am surrounded again by people who match my level of willingness and desire for intimacy.

This is no small thing.

I am honoring how fucking courageous I am for saying yes to new friendships. I am acknowledging how incredibly blessed and loved I feel, to find myself here, after the abuse, abandonment, and betrayal of the community of women I believed were my ride or die.

Note to self: Do not seek sexual healing from women in saggy diaper harem pants.

They do not embody sex. They do not have rightness with sexuality. They are wearing saggy diaper pants.

2nd Note to self: Do not stay anywhere that does not welcome all of you.

Even if they say they do, even if they did in the past, even if it will break your heart into a hundred pieces to go. There is no one who can mend your broken heart that calls any one piece ugly and wishes to throw it out.

3rd note to self: You are stronger than you know, and you know you are extraordinarily strong.

The Divine Interventionist on Facebook live called out your name last night. He said Mother Mary came through, and Mary Magdalene, to offer blessings to you. Divine feminine power. Pure love. Motherhood and sexuality — for you. All while you were staring at yourself in the mirror in your new bikini.

I bought this bathing suit before and returned it. I could not stand the way my postpartum body looked. Nothing was in the right place anymore, nothing the right size, the right tightness, the right curvature.

You looked at that body last night. Not much is different now than it was then, except for your eyes. Last night your eyes were looking with love. You looked with love at your same body.

I will not say I am grateful to look and see a round saggy belly or soft overflowing tits, or the cellulite that now lives on my ass,

but goddam it feels good to be alive, and to be a woman, and have a body that feels the warm skin of my husband in the bed at night.

I have a body that can smell my daughter's head and listen to her giggles. I have a body that knows. It knows when something is not right, or feelings go unspoken. It knows when it is time to slow down and my God, how this body tastes food and flavor and texture.

I used to look at a woman in a bikini with a belly hanging over and I would feel pity and disgust.

That is how I saw my own body after birth, disgusting. I do not want to look at any woman that way again. Most of all myself. I have the motherfucking divine feminine flowing through me. She who birthed, and fed. She who bled and swelled with the greatest power on earth — to bring forth life.

She did that. Me. I did that. I am done giving my time to wishing I looked as if I never had that power.

I bought the bikini again. I am allowing myself to enjoy it. There is nothing to earn by having the right body.

The only thing I need to wear a bikini is my own goddamn approval of me.

I get to feel good right now, and while I am finally celebrating this body in this bikini in the bathroom mirror, I have my new friends, who know what it means to back another woman’s wholeness, cheering on each bathroom selfie.

I’ve got Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene watching me from the heavens with pure love sent through a Facebook live at exactly the right moment because even the virgin mother knows that our sexuality is not just sacred.

Our sexuality is the whole fucking point.