To Whom it May Concern:

Summer. Hate it. Hate hot weather, hate crowded beaches, hate sticking to my leather-upholstered car seats. Especially hate bathing suit season. Loathe it, with the kind of unwavering hatred reserved for things like mice and ants who seem to think my house is a bloody hotel and people who are too lazy to flush or wipe the seat after they pee and popsicles that fall off the stick and into the dirt.

I spent the day at the beach yesterday with my family. My mother-in-law and I spent much of our time admiring the water from a safe distance, tucked up under the umbrella, her alternately napping and gazing out at the water, me reading a book and wading through the sludge periodically to splash with the children, Kaelan in trunks, the girls in their same-style-different-fabric suits and me in a bikini. And a flowing cotton summer dress; a short muumuu you might say.

Yes, I spent the day frolicking on the beach covered in some floral-print pink sundress type of thing I picked up several months ago on a whim, thinking *I* could pull off a floral-print pink sundress, but have never before yesterday taken out of the laundry basket since the first time I actually wore it in public, spent the entire time fretting about the parachute-like quality of my sundress's hemline and what the wind was doing with it, and swore never to do that to myself again. But in the heat of yesterday, owning only two black one-piece suits and not wanting to wear black and a pair of shorts or two layers over my torso by covering up the one-piece with the floral-print pink dress (which looked silly with the high neckline of the suit anyways) I opted for the bikini I purchased in Prince George last year when we were staying in a hotel with a pool and I forgot my black one-piece in Edmonton, worn under the floral-print pink sundress.

Please know this - I only grabbed a bikini because there was not a single one-piece to be found in the entire city (or at least the three different department stores I dragged my graciously accommodating husband and whining impatient children to.) I was glad to have it, nonetheless, as a cooler option to a one-piece, that would cleverly resemble a pair of panties if the wind grabbed hold of my dress and flipped it up I would be OK saying, "Whoops!" and move on. But even then, I don't think once I let go of the hemline. I held onto it and willed it to stay down, tucking it in when I sat and gathering it up in front when walking. What if someone sees my fat?

My weight has fluctuated about 30lbs annually since the birth of my daughter. Down 30 lbs, up 30lbs, down 30lbs, up 30lbs... we're currently on the 'up' part and I'm not really feeling all that sexy or beach-bikini ready. Insert my wise mother-in-law, in a wakeful moment, expressing delight and not an ounce of malice or envy for all the different bodies on the beach - short ones, fat ones, tall ones, skinny ones, "and look at her cute bum!" I personally don't "delight" in looking at other people's bodies. I thought, hrmm - she must have that ability because of her age... no point in being judgmental of beach bodies when you're on the brink of retirement. I tend to find it a) depressing or b) repulsive. I am envious of the ones you can look at and say, "Cute bum!" and horrified by the lack of either common-sense or modesty that would compel someone to purchase a two-piece off the XXXL rack at WalMart.

After coming home from the lake I finally decided that I'd had enough of this sinus horsepoop (that's a story for another day) and went to the MediCentre for (hopefully) some really potent extra-strength ass-kicking antibiotics. While in the waiting room (for almost 3 hours) I pick up a copy of Chatelaine. In my head I'm hearing k.d. lang singing and, being the type who usually prefers the brainless pleasure of indulging in celebrity magazines over the kinds of tripe found in most women's magazines (lose 2olbs in 20days, 327 tips for having a better orgasm, how to make your husband jealous, shabby chic on a shoestring budget, etc.) was not really hoping to find anything worth reading much less remembering.

After flipping through countless pages of Photoshopped ads, articles about tricks for making kids eat vegetables and being a better hostess, and several recipes that I'm sure made me gain weight just by reading them, I happened across an article on... women and bathing suits. Now, I'm not going to say that it was anything that brought me a revelation, and I won't harp on too much about how the entire article was cheapened by the bikini manufacturer plugs (how much do you think they paid her to mention them in the ad, oops, article?) and the customary summarization of getting over your body images and feeling sexy on the beach in a bikini in Just 10 Easy Steps (yeah, right...) but it did reinforce for me the fact that I, like millions of other women around the planet, don't EVER feel bikini ready, no matter how great a suit we find, no matter how fit we feel, no matter how far away from every person we know we may be traveling to sit on a beach covered in what amounts to a bra and panties, and no matter how many times we give ourselves a pep-talk in Just 10 Easy Steps.

Let's face it. You go to a beach, you look at the people on the beach, and you notice their bodies, and how much of them are exposed. And we know someone is looking at us, too. In our minds we say things that we wouldn't dare say to other people without sounding just plain rude or superficial. But we think them. "Oh-Em-Gee, like THAT lady needs another trip to the concession..." "Gawd, that one must be a kept woman - who else would have the time to work out THAT much..." "Jesus, that woman's skin looks like leather - maybe she should have considered a little more SPF earlier in life..." So we have to assume at least some people are saying the same things about us, right?

I'm no better than the average Jill. In fact, I'm probably one of the worst people on the planet for it. I've been known to stalk people on resorts and at the local lake waiting for just the right moment to immortalize their particularly fantastic/sexy/hideous/weird body by snapping a photograph (anonymously - stalking involves careful planning to get the person while they are facing away from you or shot through palm fronds that carefully preserve the person from being identified.) Men in banana hammocks with their enormous bellies hanging down so far that from the front they look naked. Women who resemble oatmeal poured into nylons and sprouting what look like back-breasts from their shoulder blades squeezed into tankinis that look like they were manufactured to fit on actual tankers. Little retired old men with knobby knees and the muscles and sinew visibly working in slow-motion just beneath their deeply-tanned and paper-thin skin. Foreign men with long wiry hairs sprouting from their ears and nostrils and cascading down their faces into chest and back hair so thick mosquitoes are afraid to enter. Skeletal women who look like they just walked off the set of "The Mummy Goes to Jamaica."

Women and men who have spent their lives taking very good care of their bodies are, frankly, pretty boring. Enviable, yes, but boring. They are nice to look at, sure, but really - we look at perfect people in magazines morning noon and night - made up, dressed, and photoshopped to some kind of 'perfection' that a ridiculously small portion of the population will ever achieve without tens of thousands of dollars of surgery, a personal chef, and some kind of trainer who hails from a small European country where the children will all grow up to be champion athletes. No, women don't come away from the beach imbibed with a newfound desire to take up veganism, master yoga and run a marathon. At least I don't. The beautiful beach bodies depress me, and are at best forgettable - we've been shown nothing but this sliver of the population in the media for decades. But the weird bodies, they're always memorable.

I'm not a shallow person - I swear I'm not. I'm a lover - I love people, period, even if the only thing I love about them is the fact they remind me of a person I never want to grow up to be. I've never been (outwardly) cruel nor ignorant to anyone based on their physical appearance alone, but I have been (inwardly) at times sympathetic and at others empathetic. Sympathy is a form of arrogance, in my books. It's a means of making yourself feel better by saying, 'tut, tut' when someone's worse off than you. I find myself feeling sorry for the ones who boldly strut their stuff - even when it's a LOT of stuff, who surely must know that they don't look good.

I recall one pair of ladies on a small beach a couple of years ago, spilling out the sides of their folding canvas chairs, set miles from the water, wearing lycra tarpaulins and washing down family sized bags of Lay's with 2L bottles of Coke. From the back, they looked like spectators at the beach - they might just as easily have have been planted in front of the TV to watch Survivor - and clearly had no intentions of moving from their comfy armchairs for anything silly like taking a dip in the water or playing beach volleyball. From the front, with their enormous thighs being unable to meet at the knees, their legs couldn't help but splay out in such a fashion that you could see lumps of dimply fat extruding from their inner thighs, cascading rolls that made their way up to what looked like rotting hamburger. (nb - I once knew a lady who worked in the extended care obesity unit at a US hospital - one of her jobs was to roll obese people over and treat the dead/dying flesh on their backs and buttocks, and until that point I had always thought her reference to their skin being like hamburger as a reference to the texture, not the colour as well... and I'll leave to your imagination what she described the smell as.) Not a lick of modesty there, and yet they seemed completely unashamed and unapologetic for sitting there like cellulite monoliths dedicated to the junkfood industry. And I ~insert something resembling envy but not quite~ envied them for being bold and brave. Really, that has to take balls - kudos, ladies.

Now, I am empathetic to the women who sit on the beach like me - cowards, each of us, terrified to be this exposed in public, alternately pulling at and readjusting a swimsuit that never (and I mean NEVER EVER) has enough fabric to be 'comfortable' and the others, like me, dressed in tents and feigning modesty, which is only a stone's throw from shame. Yep, shame - there it is. I am ashamed of my body. I am 5'5" and have weighed anywhere from 130 to 192lbs when not pregnant, and usually hover somewhere in the middle. Not grotesquely obese but certainly not within the BMI range 'normal' for my height. Notwithstanding the fact I know I have body dysmorphic disorder, there is a deeper thing here, for me anyways. After years and years of struggling with my weight and my body issues, what it all boils down to for me is summed up nicely in that one little word: shame. I have not been a good camper about taking care of my body, not since I can remember. Food and I have always had a terrible relationship - I'm in a constant struggle with food. Food is my enemy, one who has a two-headed coin and I always calls tails on whether I'm going to succumb to the second helping, the chocolate almonds, the bagel with oh-so-yummy cream cheese.

When I eat I flip flop between hating it (curse you, despicable creamy and delicious curry sauce!) and making love to it (oh, sweet Mary, Joseph, and Jesus - I think I'm going to die if I don't wrap my tongue amorously around just one more piece of French bread slathered with warm brie...) I rebel against food, dare it to make me fat (Oh yeah? You're just a little bag of chocolate almonds. You're sweet and tasty, and I'm going to devour you and I'm going to get fat and be happy about it and there's nothing you can do about it...) But normal people without hang-ups about food eat, so to be normal, sometimes I have to eat just to fit in - like when I go to a party and everyone is eating hamburgers and potato salad, which aren't even my favourite, even if I've just ate, even if I've behaved myself like a saint for the last week eating salads and drinking 8 glasses of water a day, I don't want anyone to comment or notice. I don't want anyone to ask, "Oh, you're on a diet?" So, I eat to blend in. Then I am mad at myself and swear I'm back on the wagon. Until my husband comes in the door with a six-pack of coolers and a bag of M&Ms...

Oh, the glorious shame. I call myself a recovering Catholic only partly in jest - I'm no stranger to shame, and all that I ought to be ashamed of. I feel like everyone seeing me on a beach (or anywhere, really) is looking at me and saying, "Wow - bet she sits on a beach washing down family-sized bags of Lay's with a 2L of Coke. And doesn't set foot in the water even once. Tsk. Tsk. Lazy cow - she did this to herself... for shame, for shame..." I am mentally and emotionally trapped by my body, and despite the fact I don't judge others by their own, feel like I not only am but deserve being judged, harshly, on what my body looks like. Being overweight for me is a public admission of failure. The shame of knowing I have yet to conquer that frontier, the one where I obtain an ideal weight and stay there for more than a couple of months. Soon as I get there, it's party time! Bring out the burritos and beers, serve up the chocolate and cheese, hand me another ice cream cone... shame shame shame. Shame on me for having no self-control. Shame on me for being a pig. Shame on me for being lazy. Shame on me for being a poor role model for my kids. Shame on me for mentally barking at my husband, "Don't touch my fat!" and squirming away when he lifts up my shirt to caress my skin. Shame shame shame.

I'm not going to end this by saying I'm off to the gym nor am I going to slam the people who invented Photoshop for letting it fall into the Evil Lords of the fashion (and child photography) industry and brainwashing entire continents into thinking that people don't even have pores let alone dimply thighs. No, wouldn't it be lovely if we could all just look at each others' bodies and not think about them? How about being able to enjoy a day at the beach without doing comparisons? Observe them like we would other works of art and nature, in all their glorious forms - Picasso to Rubens, quivering aspens to ancient redwoods, puddles to oceans - and just be... delighted? I'm also not going to end this by saying that my new mission in life is to brazenly parade around in my bikini, daring people to think what they will (because, you know, with or without my permission, they invariably will.) No, I think what I'm going to meditate on (and I do mean that literally) is instead of HOW to fix this, but IF and WHY it should be fixed. I mean, really, today we see women wearing bikini tops with less fabric than it takes to make a handkerchief, but just 100 years ago it was considered offensive to show your ankles - only brazen women wore boots with fabric tongues so it would appear you could see their stockings, so I'm sure this will be an interesting meditation...

Back to the magazine article, which really was a lot of tripe, but there was one line written in it, in fact, the very last line in the very last paragraph that went something like, "Women don't need to change their bodies to feel good on the beach - they need to change their minds." Well said. So, I want to just be delighted by my own body without an ounce of malice or envy before I'm a mother-in-law - is that so much to ask?