Woman Is Booted From Water Park Because All The Men Can’t Stop Staring

“Mom Is Booted from Waterpark Because All the Men Can’t Stop Staring [Music] [Applause]

It had begun as an innocent family outing, but she could never have imagined that it would end in such unfairness, humiliation, and rage. But it wasn’t the obnoxious children splashing and dunking each other a foot away from her, nor the overpriced food and tickets at the water park that set her off. Apparently, some people just couldn’t stand the fact that all the men were staring at her.

She hadn’t been in the water for five minutes before the spiteful girls had singled her out, and she wasn’t going to stand for it. Madeline Schaefer from Odessa, Missouri, was a dedicated mother who did everything she could to make sure her family was taken care of. But when she reached her mid-thirties, something happened that paved the way to a realization that had shattered her world. And now, seven years later, these nasty teenagers at the water park were trying to undo all her hard work.

It had all begun on one particularly hot day. Madeleine had decided to do something she would never have dreamed of doing before. She took the long-forgotten swimming costume out from its box and tried it on. It fitted perfectly, but she never expected the day to end with shame and an epic battle for her rights.

Now, Madeleine was a tall and curvy woman, but she didn’t see anything wrong with her bikini. As she tied it up and pulled her dress down over it, she gathered her family up for a surprise outing to Adventure Oasis Water Park to cool off. But when she walked to the pool and pulled her dress over her head, she became aware of all the eyes burning a hole into her back. Feeling a bit self-conscious, Madeleine sat down again and covered herself with a towel.

She looked around and made a note of all the scantily clad bodies all around her. But the men in the water park were all staring at her too. Out of her comfort zone but determined to enjoy herself, she cracked her warmest smile at the two teenage employees who were giving her the side-eye. When they smirked back at her, she couldn’t have guessed that the police would soon be involved.

Madeline mentally prepared herself and dropped her towel again. Looking around, she sat down and slid into the cool water. She closed her eyes and focused on the sensation of the cool water swirling around her and began to relax. But not five minutes after she’d gotten into the pool, the two female staff members approached her, and they were looking for trouble.

“What do these girls just said to her?” Madeline’s face flushed. She was so taken aback that she couldn’t quite process the words. Were they telling her to leave? Why? She hadn’t done anything. Squinting up at them through the glaring sunlight, she asked them to repeat themselves just to be sure she was hearing correctly. And what did they have to say about her bikini?

Not satisfied with a waterpark employee’s answer, Madeleine insisted that they tell her the real reason why she was being singled out. She had a suspicion, but in this day and age, she didn’t really think that it couldn’t possibly be true.

Even though she had mentally prepared for this, she was still furious when they came right out and said it. One of the girls, sighing, rolled her eyes as she repeated herself, towering over the mom in the pool in a display of power. She facetiously informed Madeleine that her bikini bottoms were too small and that they were inappropriate. She smirked knowingly at Madeleine. “This is a family park,” she sneered.

But that couldn’t be right. Madeleine felt mortified, but then she stopped herself. She knew that she was wearing full bikini bottoms. How dare they say otherwise? She looked around in confusion at all the other girls at the water park. Her blood began to boil when she saw that most of them were showing a lot more skin than she was. There was something very wrong with this picture. She wasn’t buying it. What these girls were doing was out of pure spite.

Madeleine’s emotions ran wild, fighting each other on her face. She felt a profound sense of shame and embarrassment that the young employees were commenting on her body. She felt totally violated. But then she began to feel something else, so she stopped herself. “I was embarrassed for a second and then it was no, no way,” she recalls.

Madeleine turned to face the staff members who were still looking her up and down accusingly. If the incident at the water park had happened years before, Madeleine said the normally shy woman may not have had the courage to stick up for herself. But she knew she had to take a stand. But why do the female employees have such a problem with her?

At 43 years old and weighing 170 pounds, Madeleine was looking fitter and feeling more confident than ever. She had shed over 100 pounds and had capped it off. Sure, her body wasn’t perfect, but all the men at the park were gawking at her nonetheless. But these nasty girls were trying to kick her out of the water park because they were jealous. That was the only logical explanation.

“My body’s different than the young girls that were walking around in their bikinis, but why should I be made ashamed of my body?” Madeline said. “I’m comfortable in my bikini. I’m happy with who I am. My first reaction was, why are you singling me out? They said that my bottoms were inappropriate. That was funny to me because they’re full-sized bottoms.”

But what was she going to do about it? The woman wouldn’t let it go. They said that Madeleine had two options. She could cover herself up with a pair of shorts, or she could leave the water park. Madeleine, now incensed, decided to speak to the supervisor on duty. “Well, I’m not covering up,” Madeleine said, enraged. “And if you expect me to leave, you’d better call the police and have them escort me out.”

Madeleine had already been through too much in her life to be treated like this. In 2005, Madeleine made a startling discovery about herself that had forced her to re-evaluate her life. She was suffering from a slipped disc when she leaned over to run herself a bath, but she slipped and fell into the tub.

Her body had been taking a huge toll due to her lifestyle, until one day it just couldn’t anymore. Emergency workers rushed to the scene, but Madeleine was in too much pain to be moved and sent them away. She lay in the tub for three days. But as she lay there, a quiet calmness washed over her. This was not what she had planned for her life. In her quest to take care of her family, she had neglected to take care of herself. This was a sign that should have been the first sign for me that I needed to lose weight, but it took me another year before I made the decision to do something, Madeleine said.

But now, at 43 years old, Madeleine was back in that awful place—shattered and mortified. She wondered if she should just give up and leave the park. But then she clenched her fists. How dare they? The officers arrived to Madeleine’s dismay, booted her from the water park.

Fifteen minutes later, the police did arrive and said that while they didn’t agree, they had to do their job. “We can’t actually say anything,” they said as we walked outside. “But I hope from the expressions on our faces, you can tell how we feel,” Madeleine wrote on her now-viral Facebook post. They were compassionate.

They too thought it was ridiculous. “I’m a 43-year-old woman who did not have the confidence or the body to put on a bikini until I was 40 years old,” Madeleine continued in her post. “I will not be discriminated against because I look too good in one,” she continued. “This was not a thong. It was a standard summertime two-piece string bikini, same as everyone else who felt confident enough in their body to wear one.

I felt like it was both age and body discrimination, and I felt like I could look around me and I could see a handful of other girls half my age wearing the same size swimming suit and not being singled out and told to put on clothes or leave,” Madeleine said angrily.

But what could she do about it? Since Madeleine wrote the Facebook post documenting how she was discriminated against at the water park, it has been seen by people all over the globe. And people were appalled by the staff’s behavior at the Adventure Oasis Water Park. But Madeleine knew that online naming and shaming wasn’t going to be enough to make them see the error of their ways.

“Long story short, I called the media and will be on tonight’s local 41 news. Several people walked out while I waited outside for the newsmen and told me how ridiculous this all was and complimented me on my swimsuit,” Madeleine wrote. Meanwhile, her post gained more support than she could have ever imagined.

Madeleine took to Facebook to show her surprise and gratitude. “In addition to other countries already mentioned, I’ve now heard from Greece, China, Hong Kong, and received over 500 beautiful letters from Brazil. I’ve been wanting to see the world, and now the world is coming to see me and sending much love,” she wrote.

“One thing I’ve learned so far is that there’s a much greater viewpoint and perspective of the human body than what is to be found in Independence, Missouri. Worldwide, and I thank and appreciate you for that,” she continued. “Much love to those who express pride over shame for all shapes, sizes, in addition to various ages and stages of this beautiful human body we inhabit our time on Earth.”

But what does Madeleine hope to achieve by highlighting the water park’s unfair policies? “While I stand by my grievance that I was discriminated against at Adventure Oasis Water Park, and I do not believe it should happen again,” Madeleine wrote, “it is not money that is going to correct the issue, but a change in the swimming park’s appropriate swimming attire policy and also an improvement involving better education and orientation of their park management.”