My Big Rack

I can still remember the first time I heard Heather B read her piece entitled "My Big Rack" at the WWfaC retreat in Melbourne, KY. This was my first taste of how Women Writing worked. I found it to be infinitely supportive and loving and have been hooked ever since. Heather had me laughing so hard as she chronicled her ongoing relationship with her boobs. I heard her read that piece again a year later. That was still some funny shit. Really great writing for me is not only profound in the moment – but hangs around and makes me think. Heather’s piece made me contemplate my relationship with my own sizeable rack. Unlike Heather, I found no humor there. I was not enchanted by the parade of bras or in love with my own body.

The summer between 5th and 6th grade, I got boobs. Seemingly overnight I went from a surfboard to a snapping turtle. A couple nights later it seems the boob fairy got a little wand happy and I found myself now sporting some C cups. Catholic middle school girls at my school wore uniforms with bibs on the top from 1st until 7th grade, at which time they were allowed to remove the bibs and wear only the skirt and standard white school blouse. My new boobs or newbs meant that my uniform no longer fit. My mom, always practical, called Sr. Maureen and asked if she could remove the bib a year early so as to avoid having to buy new uniforms for me. GROAN.

Consequently, I arrived in class the first day of 6th grade without a bib and with my new home girls right out there for everyone to see. The only 6th grader w/o a bib. Every boy in my class suddenly followed me around like a slavering idiot sporting a chubby in his pants. Every girl in my class hated me for that same reason. 7th grade girls shunned me for daring to take away what they saw as a strictly 7th grade privilege. It was perhaps one of the most lonely times of my childhood. I loved school, but this made it unbearable. I began to hunch my shoulders and always carried a stack of notebooks to hide my chest – something I still do almost 40 years later. That is until 6 months into the school year when Pam Connery bloomed and surpassed me. The boob fairies gave her D-cups and blissfully I became yesterday’s papparazi fodder and I was left alone by the boys. The girls would take longer to come around. Generally about the same time that they too began sporting their newbs.

That summer I played softball like I had the previous two summers. Softball was the only organized summer sport available to young women at the time. Having grown up playing hardball with 3 older brothers who did not play down to me, softball was almost too easy and I was quite the phenom. Until that summer. I struggled trying to adjust my batting swing and my throwing to accommodate my newbs. I won’t even mention the difficulty I had in charging around the bases with all that bouncing. Self conscious and unable to adjust to it my game suffered. My phenom status was passed on to someone whose chest was undeveloped and I continued to hate the boobs I was developing.

By the time I graduated hi school my C’s had continued to swell into D’s. By the time I graduated college they had become DDD’s. I weighed 140 pounds across that entire time so the boob growth had nothing to do with overall body weight gain. Conversations with a boy’s eyes were a rarity. Being considered a serious scientist and not just a busty brainless bim was equally rare. It was probably about this time I first mentioned having them made smaller. My mom, an OR nurse, subtly discouraged this with her surgical horror stories. I don’t know why she did that. 30 years later I think she sees more clearly the problems that my boobs have caused me.

Because I know you are now wondering – they are I’s.

I do not go out in public without a bra. Ever. Not even to the mailbox. I have not worn a bra without an underwire since hi school. Constantly enduring broken wires jabbing into the underside of my boobs or underwires working their way out of the bra at the most inopportune moment. I am patted down every time I fly. There is not a single day where my back does not scream painfully as soon as my feet hit the floor in the morning. I have grooves in my shoulders from the constant cantilevering weight. I cannot stand and press my shoulders flat against the wall. They have become permanently rounded forward. Protecting still those boobs which are no longer new.

My relationship with my breasts has not always been so negative. I enjoyed them during my 20’s when I was actively dating, then they seemed to serve some purpose other than wrecking my back. Then they were truly something to celebrate. And they brought me great pleasure and joy. Knowing what I do now, I wish I had studied a little less and gotten naked a lot more. Because at that point, my body was a thing of beauty. I take comfort in the fact that my fifth year of college I spent hanging out, not with the science majors, but the art majors. That brought out a bohemian wild part of my soul that hadn’t been seen before and hasn’t been seen since. There are lovely portfolio pieces, paintings and photos of me then in my 20 year old naked glory. Knowing they are out there somewhere and that someone admires that woman makes me smile.

I got a chance to revisit this part of my life a couple years ago when I briefly dated Ben, an old college crush. We were reminiscing about our college days – how we would discuss James Joyce, cook dinner, break into impromptu Shakespeare or the Ramones, things I had forgotten. Pulling out a book after dinner, we flipped thru laughing and crying until we came to a page that contained pictures of the annual art students come as your favorite art or artist party. There we found a young woman with long forest green hair whose skin was a wild splash of oranges and greens meant to look like a Gaugain canvas. She glances over her naked shoulder at the photographer. Not coyly at all. Her eyes are so clear and direct and slightly inviting. I love her instantly. Just as I had loved her 30 years before when Ben had caught this feral fauvist faun in his viewfinder - right before she disappeared forever.

Two weeks after that photo was taken, I was raped by a guy I had shared a couple dates with named Steve. At that time there wasn’t a name for this crime like there is now. I didn’t know that it routinely happened to other women. I imagined that I had brought it on myself with my behavior. I withdrew from social life. And college with all its freedom and raucous joy came to an end. That little bohemian piece of me fell away before I really even got to know it. I returned to the self-protecting 11 year old carrying her binders, shoulders hunched to protect her boobs and the devastated heart beneath.

As my 20’s gave way to my 30’s and my body succumbed to the physiology of undiagnosed PCOS my weight skyrocketed, my boobs got even bigger and my dating came to an abrupt end. I focused all my attention on work and hanging out with my friends. Ok if I am honest that is where I hid. My funny drunken friends who seemed to fill the hole in my life, but who really just kept the hole from healing. 15 years sped by while I slept in Bacchus’ embrace. 15 years of empty hollow thinking. 15 years that I cannot get back. 15 years of blaming myself. Blaming my boobs. Blaming the faun. Always looking at my body with hatred and turning to the bottle to make it stop. Finally not looking at all. Not caring.

It took a huge cosmic hammer to stop that cycle as it sped around year after year. For me it took CANCER. That wrenched the machinery and I fell onto the wagon and found myself again.

The problem is that the me I found looked nothing like the beautiful 20 year old I remembered myself to be. The woman I saw in the mirror weighed 340 pounds and her stare, far from the clear and direct stare of the fauvist faun, was full of self-loathing.

The eight years since that moment have been the hardest I have ever known as I swam and nutritioned and self-cared that 340 pound woman back to 240 pounds. She will never be that 140 pound piece of lovely that she was, but she has learned to wear her scars and stretch marks like a badge of honor. She is not alone, even though she is single still. And she has allowed herself to know love and lovers in those eight years.

Despite all that work, there was still that underlying hunching 11 year old with too-big boobs. I could not touch that place and find healing no matter what I tried. I have dreamed of smaller boobs since I was 11. Talked about breast reduction since I was 19. 30 years later everything is cued up for that to happen. Two weeks from now.

That is when the bottom fell out. Seems the plastic surgeon and I are not quite on the same page as far as what can be done versus what can be imagined. 2 cup sizes apart. Those 2 cup sizes felt like Palestine – impossible to come together. I was willing to reduce them by half. What he was telling me was that it would most likely be more than half – a C versus the D or DD I had imagined. I was willing to forgo my huge rack. Willing to bear the scars. Willing to lose responsivity in my nipples to be a D. Somehow having him tell me I would most likely end up a C was more than I could think about. I made it to the car, but only barely. That is when the crying started.

2 days of crying. I was not sure what caused it.

But now I am pretty sure that it was a kind of mourning. Mourning for my big rack. Mourning for the 12 year old no longer able to swing a bat. Mourning for the embarrassed 11 year old girl trying to escape being trailed by a testosterone cloud of 11 year old boys. Mourning for the fauvist faun whose exposure was maximal and whose life so brief. Mourning for every lover who has touched them and any who haven’t. Mourning for a life that might have been. A vision that might have been able. Mourning for a woman who took so long to discover that she is more than a cup size.

When this is over a great weight will have been lifted. I will be free. I will celebrate my newbs instead of hating them. That alone will make it all worthwhile. I will walk to Rossford ball field and I will run the bases as hard as I can until I pass out. I will let the faun flash an unsuspecting person. I will drop the protection of the binders and begin to walk my height. I will go to the mailbox, maybe even the store, without a bra.

I will finally just be me and not my big rack.