My Cups Runneth Over
While most 6th grade girls in 1984 were praying to the Puberty gods to be booted from the Itty Bitty Titty Committee, I woke up one school morning to the bosom of a twenty year old Hooters waitress.
The bra my mom purchased a month ago during back-to-school shopping could no longer corral them into the cups. To be fair, the new bra had been fighting for its life for weeks as I never gave it a proper try-on. My mom had breezed past the racks of wireless eyepatches my peers adorned and steered us to a sea of full figured girdles my grandma would traipse around in before slipping on her Sunday dress. When asked to “find something”, I held the least matronly bra I could eyeball in five minutes to my chest, in a size more appropriate for an eleven year old, before I threw it on the counter and high-tailed it out of there. A month later, it covered my nipples on a good day.
Anytime I ran or made sudden movements, my two breasts split into four as they spilled out over the top of the cups. I didn’t blame the bra, I blamed my body.
Why couldn’t my body just cooperate?
I cursed my chest each time I reached for a button down blouse. The smooth, cotton t-shirts I longed to wear gave intel about the war waging underneath. Wrangling my breasts and popping them back into the cups became a part-time job. The anxiety and frustration I felt all day made it feel like a full-time job.
Eleven year olds are not supposed to look like this.
Instead of asking my mom to buy me a right-sized bra, I resisted. I suffered the entire school year, creating systems of forgiving clothing, bathroom resets, and smooth moves like a lightning fast spin away-bra tug for P.E class. When those systems grew tiresome, I crafted a harness with a large safety pin, fastening it across the middle portion of my bra to pull the cup fabric together to create a larger uni-cup.
In the beginning, the fabric was tight, and the safety pin would pop open and stab me until an emergency bathroom break. Over time, the material stretched, allowing the pin to man its station, and for a hot minute, I thought I cracked the code. Eventually, holes formed from constant tension and re-positioning the pin to fresh material, and it became clear this path was unsustainable. Something had to give, and the bra had given everything it had.
Real blood and sweat fueled the resistance of what I didn’t want to accept about my breasts, my body, my lot. All attempts to alter my reality by contorting myself around a bra three sizes too small did not change their size or their determination to grow. The more appropriate size for an eleven year old stamped on the bra tag did not soothe how I felt about them, and in fact, I hated them more. Every new system, safety pin, or act of resistance, I set my body up to fail me and remind me of how little control I had over this part of myself.
It just was— no matter how badly I wanted it not to be.
When I finally acquiesced and laid the ragged, tattered bra to rest and offered my breasts a more comfortable, right-sized home, it wasn’t from a place of love. It was from a place of grief while inching toward some level of acceptance. Just enough acceptance to perhaps alleviate some of the pain.
Thankfully, good feels were not a prerequisite to loosening my grip in order to soften my suffering.
I did not grow to love them, but I found a little more ease. With my breasts nestled into a right-sized home, I simply thought about them less. When I did bump up against their edges, I felt a right-sized response to them unlike the days consumed by their existence. I moved more freely and accessed mental space for other experiences happening in and to me. And I needed that during a season filled with so much change, confusion, and heartache.
I needed more capacity to figure out how to be in the world without going to blows with one part of my experience all. day. long.