Aaaah, spring. When I think of spring, I think freshly sprouted tulips, irises, birds hopping about, butterflies flitting atop fields of green. But unfortunately, this is not what spring is all about. Spring is all about TRUTH. This is the time of the year when we see the first rays of warm sunshine illuminating our freshly raked backyards. We immediately get into our shorts and tank tops and race outside to soak up the warmth. This is our first mistake. Because once we settle back into our lawn chairs, we are afforded the first views in six months of our bare arms and legs.

I am never adequately prepared.

The bright light of spring may be great for plants, but it isn’t so great for self esteem. Oh, my God! is the first thought. What happened to my body? is the second. I looked so great in winter, how could I go from that to looking like some fat trailer trash babe from the Jerry Springer show? This is when I realize that I was probably the same fat person during winter, that my clothes were not only providing me protection from the cold, but protection from the truth. I love that protection. All winter long I can imagine how I look under all those clothes. And boy, let me tell you, I look good. I look just like I did when I was twenty-four, all buff and thin and hard-bodied. Of course, in the winter when I shower, I take pains to ignore the fat woman in the mirror. No, I am skinny and young. And hot. And all the men want me.

But unfortunately, with spring comes the blinding rays of truth. There is no place to escape in spring. That first exposure to the sun is when I realize that I have to stop kidding myself. This is when the image of the twenty-something buff girl dies and emerging from the ashes of my youthful dreams comes the forty-something, dumpy, middle-aged woman. A forty-something woman who has to come to grips with the fact that change of weather means change of fashion.

In winter and fall, I have the color black on my side. Black is slimming. Black is good. Black makes me feel great about myself. Black, however, is not a color you can wear in spring and summer without dying from heat exhaustion. And for those of us with hot flashes, black clothing means human sauna. So, we have to opt for brighter clothing.

Which means we change from slim-looking people in dark clothing to brightly-colored fat people. Nothing accentuates pudge more than pinks, light blues and yellows. However, baggy clothes are still an option. One for which I continually opt. And my baggy disguises work great—unless I am planning to engage in certain activities. Those certain spring and summer activities we all dread more than going to the dentist for a root canal. Worse than a chamber of horrors, more terrifying than an audit by the IRS is… a day at the beach or public swimming pool.

We all know we will end up there. It’s inevitable. The time will come and before we can properly prepare ourselves, we will find ourselves in a bathing suit in public. Horrifying. Unspeakable. But getting prepared for said day at the beach is the worst part by far. I am less nervous when preparing for surgery than I am when walking into a store to buy a swimming suit.

Inevitably, the day I pick to go bathing suit shopping is when the store is packed with hard-bodied twenty-somethings. The store clerk is always some perky cutie who wears a size 1 and weighs 90 pounds sopping wet. So I find myself slinking to the outer reaches of the bathing suit area, quickly grabbing the largest sizes of suits and rushing, hopefully unnoticed, to the dressing rooms.

I would now like to lodge a complaint about dressing rooms in clothing stores. Why do they insist upon using fluorescent lighting with a green cast? Fat is horrifying under such lighting conditions. Not only are you faced with a terrifying, 360 degree view of your body (no one should have to endure that), you look like you’re covered in green cottage cheese. And not only is the lighting harsh and unforgiving, you only have a four foot-by-four foot square space in which to wrestle into a spandex tube. I always come out of the room with bruises on both elbows.

So, there I was, green and naked and miserable, facing my three choices. I had the two-piece I recklessly grabbed while I was still clinging tenaciously to the last vestiges of denial, and the two, “safety” one-piece bathing suits. Daringly, I tried on the two-piece. It’s amazing how much chunkier one’s middle can look when your fat is being squeezed simultaneously from the top and bottom. My torso looked like three links of pork sausage. So, I moved on to the one-piece bathing suits. And I have to say for sheer convenience the two-piece was much easier to put on. Pull down on the top, pull up on the bottoms and you’re in. Not so with the one piece.

Trying to squeeze myself into the one-piece bathing suit was like trying to stuff a waterbed into a sock. I jumped, I wiggled, I pulled, I tugged, I twisted. By the end of it all, I had invented a new dance and threw my back out. But I have to admit, the suit covered up what I wanted covered and seemed to contain my fat fairly adequately. I should have stopped there, but for some reason, because I didn’t look overly ghastly, I decided to try on the final suit. The last bathing suit I tried on was a one-piece, but had some cut-outs in the back, exposing the small of the back. A bit sexier and youthful looking than the matronly one in which I had just jammed myself. Because the suit wasn’t a complete tube, it was easier to get on. I only had a twist and pull a couple times before I managed to wiggle myself inside the thing. Hey, I thought, from the front, it looked okay. It was a bit sportier than the other one, a bit jazzier pattern. Pretty cool. Then I checked out how I looked from behind. Instantly, my dreams were shattered. The cut-outs displayed my fat like the windows in a package of bacon.

So after departing the store with my matronly spandex wrap, I realized what the best part of spring was—I was only two seasons away from fall. Which meant I was only six months away from wearing black and returning to my happy delusions of being a twenty-something hard body.

©2005, Janet Periat