Body Images.

My oldest daughter came out of the locker room last night with a new view of the world.

She's in there because she dives. A lot. She used to have long, curly, brown hair. Now the dead, blond wisps barely graze her shoulders. A side effect of over chlorinated pools brought on by the national hysteria about germs...but I digress.

So, anyway, the showers and changing area have exposed her to a lot of naked bodies in her short decade on this planet. Mostly female, but not all. Not a problem for me, I want her to understand that not all of us, none actually, look like the girls in the beer commercials.

She has first-hand knowledge that after age, oh, seventy or so, your skin and muscles aren't as friendly with each other as they used to be. No matter how many laps a week you swim.

She's shared the shower with two-year old little boys who are really happy that their penis has been freed from the swim diaper. I told her it's a default for all boys and men, they can't keep their hands off that thing. Too fun.

She battles for locker space with the young teens who have beautiful bodies in all shapes and sizes and stages, but are shy about everything so new.

She's seen women who have so much...ahem...hair down there, that they shampoo AND condition it. Who knew? Us women, we love to talk about sex, but not so much about maintenance.

Yesterday though, even my eyes-wide-open ten year old was amazed.

Water aerobics class starts during diving, and ends after we've vacated the locker room. For those of you uninitiated in the ways of the pool, water aerobics is a class usually taken by people trying to get back into a life of movement after many years of not moving. These women are often big. Really big.

So someone was late to their water aerobics class. I heard about it something like this..."Mom, mom, mom, mooommm. I saw a woman with boobs as big as my HEAD! Her legs were the size of my TORSO. And her BUTT was as big as all the butts in our whole family! While she was putting on her suit it kept getting STUCK on the extra parts of her body!"

I enjoyed her amazement. I reminded her that this woman was putting in an effort to get back to "healthy." I don't like the words fat and skinny. I teach my kids to move, not as a way to control weight, but because that's what bodies are made to do.

All my daughter could focus on though was making a mental note to NEVER get that big. I can't blame her. There are teachable moments, and then there are "ah-ha" moments. I don't think that image is going to fade from her mind any time soon. Maybe it shouldn't. When it comes to living in the skin we were born with, some things are beyond our control but not ALL.

Chalk up one more life lesson to the women's locker room.