Thirty Days of Truth: Something You Hate About Yourself

(Well now, this isn't a very positive way to start out the challenge, is it? But I suppose that is why they call it a challenge about truth.)

When I was in fifth grade, my mother took me to the department store.

It seemed that I needed a bra.

In all honesty, I had likely needed a bra for a little while, but my mother is a big believer in that lovely oasis called Denial. In any case, when she decided to finally bite that particularly bitter bullet for a mother, I wasn't quite sure what to make of the whole situation. I was ten, after all.

I didn't need a training bra. I needed a bra bra. This puppy wasn't just for show; from the get-go, I needed a working machine. Little did I know how large the role these garments would have in my life as a woman.

By the end of high school, I was sporting somewhere between double Ds and triple Ds, depending on my weight fluctuations. My mother, who would probably prefer to live in a country where burkhas are prevalent, encouraged me never to wear anything form-fitting. Showing the curve of a breast, you see, would be the equivalent of passing out to my classmates engraved invitations to an orgy starring ME. Eager to please and earn As at home as well as school, I complied: my wardrobe consisted of oversized shirts and hoodies courtesy of the Gap. I even wore a T-shirt over my bathing suit, much to the confusion of my friends. I successfully managed to hide my femininity though high school, and I am sure my mother was relieved.

The sense of shame about my breasts that was cultivated in puberty has never left me. Mine are too big and way too real for the adorable bras they sell at Victoria's Secret or Gap Body. Instead of matching lingerie sets or sexy bras with designs or ruffles or quirky prints, I am best friends with Wacoal. Don't get me wrong; Wacoal is a wonderful company with a wonderful product. But let's be honest: Wacoal sounds like your hefty German aunt who wears comfortable shoes. Cosabella, Felina, La Perla, Natori -- now those are the Italian and exotic cousins with perky breasts wearing stilettos. They ooze sex. Wacoal never gets laid. Wacoal is not perky.

My breasts managed to feed three children for a combined total of forty-two months, and that is nothing to dismiss lightly. In that amount of time, they never succumbed to mastitis and barely even acknowledged a plugged duct. That is pretty cool of them. On the other hand, they had a tendency to produce enough milk for, I don't know, the population of Los Angeles? And so I was able to do many party tricks during that time, including nearly blinding my children with close-range lasers of hot milk and hitting walls on the other side of the room -- often in public places -- after releasing the clip on the nursing bra. Good times, friends.

Between babies two and three, I lost my baby weight and my breasts were very much akin to long tube socks filled with uncooked rice. They hung, National Geographic-style, due south. I rolled them up in the mornings and tucked them into my Wacoals, still size 36DD or DDD, and heaved a long sigh of depression that never in my life did I ever actually sport breasts that ever pointed anywhere close to north, and now I never would without the help of a whole lot of painful surgery.

Since the birth of number three, however, I haven't lost all my baby weight. My breasts have remained very full. That sounds like a good thing, but it's really not. At the age of thirty-six, I might as well be back in tenth grade. My breasts make me look even bigger than I actually am. They demand larger sized shirts that don't pinch back in at what remains of my waist. They are impossible to lug around at the gym and, when forced to chase a certain threenager in public, they bounce ponderously and threaten to throw me terminally off balance. They don't make me feel feminine; they make me feel like a heifer. Even in normal clothes, they give me such cleavage that I have to worry about wearing normal, everyday clothes to my sons' elementary school. They make me feel like a slutty heifer. They make me hot, they are heavy, they can hold several pencils under their heft.

I hate my breasts.

I'm not a fan of elective surgery because I am afraid of pain and, well, surgery. I don't have back issues because of my breasts that I can claim. Really, I need to lose my baby weight and then see what remains when the dust settles and the fog clears. It's a pretty safe bet, though, that my breasts and I are never going to be on great terms.

It could be worse.