Spring has arrived! The sun came out last weekend, and I worked out in my garden pulling, and chopping and snipping to death everything I deemed out of place or unsightly (how dare they!) But this weekend truly marked the start for me – Memorial Day Weekend.

In Seattle, we are used to too long, grey months, but once in a while, a season outlives bearableness. The grey, close days where the gauge hovers between 40 and 50, lengthen well beyond the standard confines of a single season. This year, our city hit a record: 44.67 inches of rain in the city between October and April, according to the National Weather Service, the wettest seven months since 1895 when they started keeping track of such misery. Even in the best of years, Seattleites denude themselves at the slightest rise in temperature. It’s 65 degrees—shorts weather! It’s 70—pool time! And, as a teacher, I am privileged to more half-cheeked, full navel, armpit hair exposing fashion trends than the gentler professions. Yes, it’s Spring, and the sunshine has woken long-dormant hormones and blasted the sex drives of hundreds of teenagers into overdrive.

So how does a no-longer-twenty-something feminist navigate the warmer weather and quiet the body critic that emerged in me around the same age it is making itself known for my students and my children. How do I teach my girls, especially, to love their bodies while battling my own inner shriek at the sight of too much flesh? How do I love the beauty that is each human form, including my own, when most of the time I am all too conscious of the parts that stick too far out, or not out far enough or seem to have a gravity all their own?

So I did what I often do when I’m feeling overwhelmed: I took myself shopping. It’s my one opportunity to be alone on the weekends. If a weed whacker needs purchasing, I shove my family out of the way to get to the door. If there aren’t enough eggs, I readily volunteer to run that errand. Anything that gets me space for breath. And as I was driving to Home Depot (yes, we really did need a weed whacker!) I was listening to This American Life. The show was, “Tell Me I’m Fat,” and Ira Glass was interviewing Lindy West, a columnist for The Guardian. The first thing I heard was Glass’ iconic voice say, “the moment that she actually came out and said to everyone she knows that she’s fat…” Fat? Did he just say fat? In my family, that is the other F word. Still, I turned up the volume and listened more closely as West chronicled fighting fatism at work, and how Leonard Nimoy had turned her life around with a series of black-and-white photos from The Full Body Project. These photos of “fat women naked” (Glass’ words) presented them in a way she had never seen before, as beautiful, as art. She asked herself, what would happen if she chose to think of these bodies as objectively appealing…and that question changed everything for her. She began to see all the body parts she had previously judged and condemned as attractive. She found confidence in herself, she stood up to her boss, and became an advocate for all bodies.

By this point, I’m sitting in the parking lot of the Home Depot listening to the radio. The quintessential NPR moment! Up next, Elna Baker, a staff writer for TAL. Her fat experience was different. Rather than learning to love her body, she lost well over 100 pounds in under 6 months. A crazy amount of weight loss! And it worked. She went from being the woman society deems overweight and, therefore, invisible, to the typical idea of woman thin enough to be attractive and noticed. She even told the story of a man who lived in her apartment building whom she had met and talked with when she was heavy. Then, after she lost the weight, the two of them began dating. After several months, she realized he had no idea she was the same woman from before. No idea! For years they had lived in the same building, but he had never seen her. He had talked with her, but never seen her. She realized it didn’t matter who she was as long as she was thin. Thin equals datable. Thin equals loveable. Thin equals good.

So, I thought, finally emerging from my car, where does that leave me? It’s often difficult to wade through the layers of static to find what is real. I have internalized societal standards of beauty so far and fed my fat-hating critic so thoroughly, that it takes rigorous practice to shift into a place of love and acceptance with my body. I want to practice compassion. I want to relax about my weight and the way I see myself. feminist.com suggests I do the following:

• Experiment with what weight feels comfortable, rather than trying primarily to be thin.
• Be more accepting of weight variations as I age.
• Develop a clearer understanding of which health problems are truly associated with weight (we are told all the time that fat equates with unhealthiness).
• Exercise and eat nutritious (delicious) food to feel healthy, and let my body weight set itself accordingly.

Brilliant! Of course! I want to enjoy great food, feel alive and vital, be comfortable in my cloths, feel sexy… but how? Every day I feel surrounded by perky, nubile girls who have not given birth. I see those forms repeated in the media and in store windows, not to mention in the cut and style of available clothing lines. So, what are we to do? Here are a few steps I’ve decided on (thanks, again, to some prompting by feminist.com):

• focus my attention on the real people I choose to surround myself with—older women; people with different abilities and disabilities, people of all sizes, shapes and colors.
• support magazines that show women of all colors, sizes, shapes, and abilities– real women as we know them, not airbrushed, white-looking, thin models.
• let TV stations or magazines or clothing stores that shows positive (or negative) images of women know what I think.
• Buddy up with my friends to challenge ourselves and others when we judge women on the basis of appearance.

So, Memorial Day. I spent the day at Hood Canal with family. I wore shorts and didn’t waste a moment thinking about it. I laughed and played with my baby cousin, hugged and loved on my son, reveled in the company of my 91 year old grandmother who is still feisty and active, and took the kayak out for a spin. And got an ice cream on the way home.

Happy Spring, everyone!