In May...

In May, there are exams and flies. The evenings lengthen. The dawn chorus peaks. There is the slight possibility of eating outside but my children do not want to eat outside because it means carrying too many things. In May, nature excels. There is rebirth, regrowth and hay fever. It is my favourite time of year and not my favourite time of year. I have enough weeks and not enough weeks to shed the weight I want to shed before the summer. But shifting this half stone times two is unlikely to make me any happier, it seems, because being a socially acceptable size for summer hasn’t made Elizabeth Day happier.

Elizabeth Day is tall and slim. At least, I think she is tall and slim. I have never met her. She has written nine books. She has a podcast about how to fail. She has a very interesting life which involves a lot of parties, and her new proof just dropped, and she interviewed Simon Cowell this week, and she has a sharp haircut, and she can get away with short cocktail dresses because she has endlessly long legs. But when I google “what height is Elizabeth Day?”, I discover she is five-foot-six, the height my dad used to be. But on her Substack which has 17,000 more subscribers than mine, she recently wrote a piece¹ about weight loss injections and the struggle for self-acceptance. She said many women who came of age in the 1990s still battle with body confidence and what are they to do now that drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro are so readily available? Something that started out as medication for health reasons has now become normalised as a lifestyle choice. Her iPhone had recently served up a memory of her wedding in April 2021. She was wearing an objectively beautiful cream, satiny dress, she said. But the only thing she could focus on was the way the sunlight had hit the fabric and emphasised her slightly protruding stomach. It bothered her plus the fact that the numbers on the scales were bigger than she wanted them to be and there were moments in high street changing rooms when she couldn’t seem to pull waistbands up. And she felt like a failure not because she had a stomach but because she couldn’t rise above what she knew to be a pernicious lie that “women shouldn’t have stomachs. Or hips. Or upper arms”.

In May, I provide a running commentary on my garden. I assign spiritual meaning to the seasonal changes. I explain how as the cherry blossom falls to the ground, the wisteria blooms. I say wait to you see what happens here and I post a photo on Instagram, of the hedge that runs the whole length of my driveway. It is brown and barren and thin and twiggy if twiggy is a word. I caption it ‘Day 1’. On ‘Day 8’, I post another. The hedge has filled out. It is green and verdant and thick and luscious. And people clap like I am responsible for spring.

“Wouldn’t you be significantly happier if you were just a little bit thinner and could fit into that ever-elusive smaller size?” said Elizabeth Day’s inner critic.

“So many of us have been conditioned - for whatever reason, be it upbringing or sociological context - to believe that looking thinner makes you look better. I don’t think this is true. I’ve never looked at a woman and thought ‘you’re beautiful because you’re so thin’,” said her rational mind.

In May, the Bollinger Garden opens at my local five-star hotel resort and spa, and I vow I will go at least once and sip champagne in the sunshine possibly on a Sunday afternoon before it closes again in August, but I probably never will because the sunshine and a free Sunday afternoon will never quite align.

In May, I leave sunscreen beside the front door, but everyone ignores it because it’s May and it’s not supposed to be hot and sometimes, they get burnt.

In May, the peonies are at their best. On the second Thursday in May, I arrive home to find some arranged in a vase on my worktop. “Did my flowers arrive?” I ask my husband. I am impressed because I only ordered them late the night before. “I bought them for you,” he says because he noticed a florist whilst he was queuing at the fish van for a side of salmon. He has also noticed that I am not quite myself, that I am living with what I describe to him as a constant sense of foreboding, and he is not quite sure how to help me with this. I contact the other florist. “Can you hold my order,” I say. I explain that my husband has made a spontaneous and unexpected purchase. We agree on delivery the following Wednesday. They tell me to ring again on Tuesday if I find my marital peonies are still hanging in there. I can postpone further. Peonies have a painfully short flowering season, but this May, I get to love them twice.

In May, WeightWatchers files for bankruptcy. It has been dealing with a "rapidly changing weight management landscape," it says. It has been struggling with fierce competition from fat-loss jabs, says the BBC. Its original model no longer makes sense in a world where weight loss can be outsourced. Ozempic and Mounjaro aren’t community-led and effort-based. They don’t ask for belief and patience. They offer noticeable and controllable results on prescription. “That shift has implications far beyond weight loss,” said The Drum². “If your brand relies on narrative, ritual, and identity-building, what happens when the audience just wants the outcome?”

In May, there are four Wednesdays and on the first of them, I turn a corner, and I see a long corridor and I do not know how we are going to get down this because there are no seats along it and so we just walk very slowly. And I am aware that the person beside me is no longer five-foot-six, that they have shrunk, and the light has somewhat gone out of their eyes and yet, I must do nothing other than walk beside them. I cannot take their hand because they are not a child. It is teatime and the hospital is empty, and I am directed by cleaners and porters and orderlies to where we need to be, and I want to weep at their unprompted kindness. I sit in a waiting room, and I read the signs about x-rays and CT scans, and I watch the whole of the local news programme even though I never watch the news because I have no control over the television that is hanging on the wall.

In May, I have forfeited my study. It has been repurposed as a revision zone with whiteboards and Post-its and Staedtler pens and headphones and flipflops and a blanket and the remnants of matcha lattes. I capture my daughter concentrating in front of her laptop and when I zoom in later, I see pictures of clothes on her screen, and I realise she is shopping for her holiday wardrobe. In May, there are alarms which go off repeatedly in my house. I am woken by them at 5.20am and every five minutes thereafter until I get up and I go into a bedroom, and I extract the child’s phone from under their pillow and I toggle all the alarms for the next hour to off. And I understand this repeatedly hitting the snooze button because rote learning to perform in memorisation tests holds no meaning. It doesn’t prepare for life.

“Worry worms its way into my life through the gap between responsibility and control,” said Andy Hood,³vicar-in-training. He had realised this when organising events. He felt responsible for how many people signed up. Yet, he couldn’t control how many people signed up. And then he had kids, three of them. He was responsible for his children. But he wasn’t in control of them. And worry wormed its way again in to that gap. And then he realised, he couldn’t close this gap, and he shouldn’t try. “To abdicate responsibility or to seek control are just two different flavours of failure. The gap between them isn’t a bug in the code of life, it’s a feature. It’s part of being human, and so human flourishing means learning to live well with, even in, that gap,” he said. The question though was how?

I didn’t know. It seemed all we really wanted was to be in control of our bodies, of our circumstances, of our responsibilities, of our outcomes. I reckoned May was trying to tell me something about this though.

1. Elizabeth Day

2. The Drum

3. Andy Hood