I sometimes forget, mid-shower, whether or not I shampooed my hair just five minutes earlier. But almost 20 years since it happened, I still recall the moment when my boobs truly 'arrived.'
I was 14, tap dancing in a magenta, crushed-velvet, turtleneck bodysuit at a studio on Long Island. One of my fellow tappers, a well-developed woman of 16, raised her eyebrows, impressed, as if to say, 'You go, girl!' After class, she cracked, in the nicest way possible, that I should probably start wearing a bra to practice. (Though I'd been wearing cotton, clasp-front 32A Jockeys from the J.C. Penney junior's department to school, they were purely ceremonial.)
Apparently, I'd sprouted respectable, medium-size boobs over the summer—and they'd been flapping around during Time Step Two!
My cup literally ran over. As a late bloomer, I'd been waiting for my boobs since I tore through the Judy Blume canon at age 11. Dear God, I don't really care about the period, but where are the hell is my rack? Breasts were a harbinger of womanhood, or at the very least teenhood. They were a sign that I'd one day shed my braces and bad 'Rachel' haircut and graduate to my own phone line (never happened), a Sweet 16 at a neon-lit catering hall (definitely happened), and a social calendar stocked with dates. So when my knockers showed themselves in earnest that summer before ninth grade, I welcomed them with open arms and jazz hands.
But now, at 33, I'm once again left wondering where the hell my boobs are.
Some time in the 18 months since having my daughter, it came to my attention that my ample décolletage had gone missing. Once respectable 34Cs—a size seemingly always referred to as a 'handful'—they'd shrunk from bonafide breasts to teeny titties. They could still be considered a handful…if that hand belongs to newborn baby.
Flashing my mom after getting out of the shower (as one does), I stated the obvious: "My boobs disappeared." When I lay down, I added, my chest was as flat as a tween boy's. "Oh my God," she said with a special brand of motherly pity/amusement. "Where did they go?"
It was a great question, and a total mystery. I half expected the screeching CSI: Miami theme to crash through my apartment, and David Caruso to materialise, raise his sunglasses, and purr, "Looks like your boobs got the breast of you."
I thought having a baby was supposed to make your chest bigger - and it had, initially. In fact, one of my inaugural pregnancy-induced body changes was busting out of my sports bras during my first trimester. While breastfeeding my daughter for about 10 weeks (I was shooting for 12, but after reading online that Beyoncé, a goddess among humans, did it for 10, I let myself off the hook), the size of my boobs once shocked my best friend—even through a baggy sweater. Through the delusion of sleep deprivation, having bigger bazungas felt like a bright spot.
But pregnancy giveth boobs, and pregnancy can taketh away. Weight gain and increased estrogen in your body can up your cup size during pregnancy, Alyssa Dweck, MD, ob-gyn and author of V is for Vagina, tells me via e-mail. "Engorgement from milk letdown is most exaggerated as your brain/breasts/baby figure out how much milk to make," she says. But losing the baby weight (in my case, while screaming "Are you fucking serious?" at Tracy Anderson's punishing postpartum videos) can also mean losing boobage.
More significantly, "the skin of your breasts had been so stretched out during pregnancy and with nursing," she says, "that some of the elasticity is lost." This, Dweck explains, can create the "drooping" that makes breasts appear smaller. Luckily, because my ladies were never that big in the first place, it's not like they're now hanging at my waist. But it feels like a cruel twist that a year of bigger boobs came at price of smaller, more pancake-like ones now.
The irony isn't lost on me that as a teenager I saw breasts as pillowy symbols of womanhood, but now that I am an adult woman, a wife and mom, and an employed person, I am once again unbestowed. It's a friendly reminder to my 14-year-old self that boobs do not a woman make. I'm not going to beat myself up over my relative flatness this time around, listening to Tori Amos CDs and writing bad poetry like I did in junior high. I'm not especially happy that the boobs I once longed for have abandoned me. I liked them. We'd coexisted happily for decades. They'd always been there for me—especially in my twenties when I dug a low-cut, body-con LBD.
That said, it's also not lost on me that my boobs helped keep my daughter alive for almost three months, which is a pretty impressive feat. It's a fact that heartens me when I am looking at my chest in the mirror, shaking my head, and asking aloud, "Are you guys ghosting me?"
By Michelle Ruiz, Via Elle.com
