Every Wednesday at 5-o’clock, Ruby has swim class. Once her thirty minutes of floating, leaping, belly-flopping and retrieving pink plastic rings has elapsed, it is our routine to head for the locker room and change her into her “soft pants.” This has proven to be a giant effort because while I’m trying to get her wet clothes off and her dry clothes on, she is involuntarily frozen in place like a zombie, transfixed by three 8-year-old girls who are also changing—secretly, beneath towels pulled around their bodies like cocoons—at the same time each week following their swim team practice. Oh, how her eyes swirl when these little girls tramp through the locker room in their swim caps and racer-back suits, dripping wet, shivering and hugging themselves on the way to the showers.

Ruby stares at them as I wiggle her swim suit over her bottom, around her hips and down to her ankles.  She stares as I dry her naked body with the mostly wet towel, as I coach her like I might an invalid to step into her underwear (if I remember to bring them) and then into each of her pants legs. Meanwhile, the girls completely ignore her—with the exception of a slight smile offered by one on the very first day of lessons—while they gossip about other kids and prevent any accidental exposure of their privates.

As I’m pulling Ruby’s clothes across her sticky skin, watching her rapturously watching them, I’m aware of the already-in-full-bloom body image issues being modeled not 6 feet away from my daughter. And I’m reminded of 7th grade gym class. And my teacher, Mrs. Allen.

At nearly 6-feet tall, Mrs. Allen was an imposing figure. She wore white tennis socks, white leather athletic shoes and pleated navy blue Bermuda shorts, always with a cotton tank top, usually white. She might wear a wind breaker or warm up pants if it was cold, the kind that made a wooshing noise as she walked.  She was big boned and thick-kneed with a voice like ball bearings and short, curly brown hair that looked like it had been plucked from a mannequin head circa 1977. I used to watch for wig confirmation, to see if it would slide around when she scratched her head, something she did often when she wasn’t handling equipment or managing fitness tests.

Whatever our activities, each day at the end of dreaded gym class, we were required to take a dreaded shower and then, to prove it. Mrs. Allen would lean against the doorway of the shower room with a clipboard in her hand, inspecting each girl for shower evidence. I don’t know where I’d learned to be self-conscious but, like the other girls in my class, I wasn’t about to get naked in front of anybody, which of course makes it fairly challenging to shower. But, like the other girls in my class, I managed my way around the requirement quite well.

I wrapped myself in a white towel, tucking it at mid chest like I’d learned from my mother, and I did the hokey-pokey in the communal shower like the rest of the troops: Stick one leg in, then the other. Stick one arm in, then the other. I’d splash some water on my chest, shoulders and face (sure, actual showering would have been less effort but this was equally convincing and less…nude). Then I’d show Mrs. Allen the necessary proof to be freed for a day. I was 12 years old.

Later, as a dance major in college—a situation that sometimes required full costume changes not just backstage, but in the wings—I had a very difficult time unlearning the don’t-get-naked-in-the-locker-room rule that had defined my self-loathing since junior high. I’d hidden and hated my body for a long time and that didn’t just magically come undone. And now my four-year-old is learning, from girls only twice her age, that she should be embarrassed and ashamed of her body.

Raising a daughter is treacherous. Short of stripping off my clothes in the locker room every Wednesday, I’m not exactly sure how to combat this message or if anything I say will be half as cool as what those girls do.