The pool opened last weekend. I thought I was ready to go with my new halter swimdress (shut up) and my sunscreen and my baseball hat. Sure, it had been a long, cold winter accompanied by many, many seasoned wedge fries, but last summer I even bared midriff a few times and felt fine about it.

Also, I haven't had a full-length mirror in my bedroom since last summer. And I never go use my daughter's. So I actually don't know what I look like unless I catch my reflection in a store window, which only happens when I am fully clothed.

Imagine my surprise when I went to use the bathroom at the pool and caught sight of my full-frontal while pulling up my swimming suit. The florescent lights bouncing off cinder block highlighted every lump and bump that was not there last year.

My stomach seized up, and I started to feel hot and tingly.

I manage the anxiety that once caused my eating disorder through a combination of medication, previous talk therapy, exercise, sleep and maintaining a certain weight window in which I feel comfortable with myself. I seem to have tipped over the edge of that window this winter, because as I stumbled back toward my seat, I felt shaky.

And that was when I saw her, my new mom friend -- adorable and tiny and right in the path. I stopped to talk to her and knew I was coming off normal, but the entire time I was talking to her I just wanted to wrap my body in a beach blanket and starve until I felt better. I felt like she could see all the flaws and was taking stock, even though she's a delightful person and why would she do that? Of course she wasn't doing that. But I felt it: the shame.

And I haven't felt like that in years. YEARS.

I walked back to my chair and sunk in. The tears started rolling out from under my sunglasses a few minutes later. Beloved said nice things, tried to make me feel better -- but I know he didn't realize how seriously I was melting down at that moment.

I sat there telling myself I'm 37. I don't need to look like a 24-year-old. I'm a perfectly acceptable 37-year-old. And isn't that sort of shallow, anyway? And haven't I been writing a novel about a protagonist overcoming ED and haven't I been crusading about ED and taking issue with NYT ballet critics ALL YEAR? WHAT THE FUCK, BRAIN?

I took deep breaths. I told myself fat isn't a feeling. And I realized it isn't. My feeling was anxiety -- a severe hit of it -- and I was focusing it on my thighs. I was telling myself that I was a lost cause because I didn't stop working out this winter -- in fact I worked out harder than I have in years -- so it was difficult to stop catastrophizing that exercise no longer worked for weight maintenance, and I would just end up growing and growing from here with no hope. (Because that is the fear that my ED brain wants me to believe.)

My rational brain -- the one in charge 99% of the time -- knows that there is no "always" ever in anything in life, and weight management is just another one of those things. You don't always look great, you don't always look bad. Nothing is absolute, and everything about humans is in a constant state of flux, from our glucose levels to our shoe sizes to our hair length to our weight.

But revisiting that feeling, that download of self-hatred, was really upsetting. It made me hot and then cold and shaky and angry and sad. Thankfully the little angel was in the pool and didn't see her mother crying while staring at her hips.

It's since passed. I am aware that one thing that keeps the wolves at bay for me is staying in that five-pound range of normal BMI that has my clothes fitting without panty lines and me passing full-length mirrors without doing a double-take. I've been more careful this week about what I put in my mouth. But I also know that some parts of it -- the gravity parts, the cellulite parts -- may not be fixable by a sensible diet and exercise program. They may be part of 37. They may be part of my genetic code. I may actually not be able to do anything about the redistribution of what used to be higher on my frame. And I'm going to have to accept that, pronto. I am not going to spend the second half of my life being controlled by that feeling the way I spent the first half.

I AM NOT.

My friend AV blogs about sex. She's a sex blogger. SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX

It doesn't seem like a job for the faint of heart, and fortunately, she isn't. She mentioned to me once that her family had asked her to adopt a pseudonym for writing because her writing embarrassed them. This week, AV wrote about it on BlogHer.

She wrote:

And if one thing I write makes one person feel less isolated, then my mission is complete.

Know, too, that I don't write about these things because I think it's safe or because I live with my head in the clouds and think it's perfectly acceptable to do so, but because I know it's not safe and it's not acceptable in this or any other society. This isn't a popularity contest -- it's a call to arms. This is the resistance.

In telling my stories I am liberating others to do the same, whether privately with me in my inbox, or in their own lives.

She wrote this and a lot more on her Facebook wall, in response to family members telling her they were embarrassed by her actions, telling her they felt sorry for her parents.

Then her mom responded:

Having said all this -- what do we think about our daughter? Allow me to express with pride that my husband and I find ourselves extremely satisfied in how she shares her own experiences and thoughts. You think we should feel ashamed but we fail to find reason to do so. We raised a daughter who stands firmly on her beliefs and values despite strong opposition. There is no shame in that.

Writing and family -- it's always a tightrope that every writer walks, and maybe more so every blogger. In telling our own stories, it's very difficult to not share someone else's. But AV is only writing stories of her own experiences -- if anyone should be upset, it should be the other individuals who were in the room, not her family.

I've had disagreements with my family over whose stories were whose, over whether or not I curse too much or have unpopular politics. I've often wondered if I embarrass my family on a regular basis with my words.

I think -- at least in American culture -- someone who writes about sex, not pornography, not erotica, but the actual act of sex as a physical, emotional, spiritual or not experience -- is literally and figuratively getting naked in a way few other writers do. Parenting bloggers write about guilt and walls streaked with poop. Food writers describe burning things, falling souffles, embarrassing mistakes. The ability to feel and express sexual desire is almost caricatured in modern society -- it often feels like there is only porn or tantric soul rocking -- nothing in between, but it is in the between that the rest of us live. Are we loved? Do we love properly? Is there a properly? If we don't have sex often enough, are we undesirable? Is sex as important as we thought it was? Is it more important than we thought it was? What is sex past twenty, past thirty, past when you look hot doing it? What is sexiness after the body starts to decay? What is sexiness when you're young and not yet comfortable with yourself?

I don't write about sex, other than the How to Get a Happier Marriage posts I did for BlogHer last year. It's not something I'm comfortable blogging about. But I did write about it a little in my novel, and in doing so, I started asking myself all those questions above. Sex is more and less than what we think it is. Perhaps it's the most vulnerable we can be.

I think as a people we're afraid to talk about actual sex for all of these reasons. We're comfortable with hinting at it, commoditizing it, using it to sell beer, acting as though we get it all the time, pretending we don't need it or we live for it, but heaven forbid we ever talk about it as the inherent part of the human experience it actually is.

I opened the door to see a slight man standing on my front step. "I was driving by," he said, gesturing to his truck, "and I noticed your trees could use thinning."

I stepped outside, noting the woodchipper hitched to the back, the phone number on the side. "How much?"

He threw out a number, too high. I called Beloved, master negotiator. A few minutes later, my husband sent me to the ATM for the final amount. "Hurry," he said. "It'll go faster than you think."

I laughed. Surely they couldn't trim three trees that fast? But when I looked outside, the man on the doorstep was already 20 feet in the air. Three huge limbs lay on the ground. I thought about how long it would take Beloved and I to cut down such limbs, to drag them away. They must've weighed as much as a man.

I got in the car.

By the time I got back, the little man had moved to the front. "How much off this one?" he asked.

"As much as you can," I said. "I keep worrying that one's going to smash my car."

My sister and the little angel and I went on an errand. We were gone maybe twenty minutes, and when I returned, the man and his truck were gone, the trees transformed -- gone were the tributaries of tiny branches and left were the strongest limbs.

I pulled up to the house and sat there, staring at the tree, thinking how much I longed to trim my life like that, strip it to its skeleton, slash and burn the dead branches that come crashing down every time it rains.

With all the clutter gone, I could finally see my house.

"I've been listening to Dave Matthews Band lately," he said, apropos of nothing.

"Really? Were you drunk?"

"No, that's the weird part."

We mused, then, about the concert we went to with people I no longer know, the guy who lost his wallet when he rolled down the hill at Sandstone, attempted deals in the parking lot. The first time I saw Dave Matthews in concert was with my husband, though I spent a lot of time brooding to that music in my first-floor apartment 42 steps from the street on Barry in Chicago.

I just spent ten minutes trying to remember the name of that street, where so much of my personality was laid down.

Which blows my mind.

It's one street south of Briar. I only remember that because of the Briar Street Theater, where I saw Blue Man Group when it was three guys and some paint. They dropped toilet paper from the ceiling, and when I left, my head was buzzing like I'd had mushrooms and six shots of tequila, and I was totally sober.

While sitting here thinking about all this, I've been listening to Ani DiFranco, "Sorry I Am," on repeat. I leaned on Ani pretty hard during my twenties. We searched for love together.

I don't know why red fades before blue, it just does.

But now, it seems, even Ani isn't Ani anymore. She's got a baby and a partner, and it sounds like she's happy. I need to get her latest album. I haven't thought about music as a thing in a long time -- it's just something that flows through the background of my days. I don't need it like I once did.

I'm getting to the point where the events that once seared themselves into my mind are hazy.  I don't really remember specific things so much as what I was feeling when I was listening to that song, as though I could briefly inhabit the body of Rita at 17, at 21, at 25, a real-life time traveler. 

You are only coming through in waves. Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying.

Past events that used to hurt are scarred over now. I can push on them, nothing. 

And I can once again listen to the songs I used to love.

The little angel didn't like the outfit I designed for her this morning.

I told her if she wanted something different, she'd have to go get it herself, with me not being her personal assistant and all.

MAD EYES.

STOMPING.

STOMP, STOMP, STOMP.

Beloved and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

"We created this, you know," he said. "Literally."

And then we both yelled at her to knock it off as the stomping sounds traveled across the upstairs hall toward her room.

As I emptied the dishwasher, I saw her plaintive cheeks peeking in from the living room. I walked over, gathered her on my lap, rubbed her back.

"Do you think it's even remotely possible for you to stop stomping? I won't yell if you won't stomp."

She shook her head. I felt it rather than saw it.

"Why not?"

She wiped her nose on my shirt. "Because it makes me feel better to stomp when I'm mad."

I considered.

That's true.

"I'm learning that if you just wait a little bit, the mad part will go away and then you can go back to being happy."

She shook her head again. "I keep thinking about it even though I don't want to. And then I get mad again."

"Well, I guess it's sort of up to you if you want to think about it again. It's taken me an awful long time to learn not to do that."

"I guess I'll just stomp." She wiped her nose on my shirt again and wrapped her little arms around my waist.

"I love you, Mommy."

"I love you, too."

Well, I guess stomping isn't really the worst thing in the world. She'll only be six for another few weeks. And I stomped until like yesterday.

Glass vases held live tulips and flickering candles. The high school gym, a charity-auction prom, thudded with live music. As I bobbed back and forth on the dance floor, I felt my tights working their way down to my knees. Wasn't feeling like such a hottie, no, not really owning my beauty. In fact, I was wondering exactly how stupid I looked dancing in my glasses and the old-lady top that was the only thing that vaguely went with my most comfortable boots.

I remember when I used to flail with abandon in college -- the only time in my life when I really felt comfortable dancing in public, and always because the dance floor of whatever smoky bar I found myself in was always packed with other people, also dancing, and usually more drunk or high than I was.

Somewhere in there I became self-conscious, uncomfortable changing in front of my friends or using a public bathroom or dancing for a good cause.

Beloved gave me the chin-up-the-little-angel-is-probably-fried-in-the-auction-daycare wave. I looked over at my closest friend. "I think we're going soon," I mouthed over the music. She peered at me. She could've been my sorority sister -- my age, from Iowa, someone I would've been friends with in college -- all of them were. She bumped me in the hip, still glorious.

"Dance until you have to leave, Rita!" she yelled.