BREASTS. (Got your attention?)

Breasts. All women are born with them. Some of us are lucky enough to have a really good and satisfying relationship with them as we move from the bud stage to the droop age, and some of us are not. I’m sure you can all remember that first sign of impending womanhood when mom took you for your first “training bra.” ( Or if you were built like me, you skipped training and went right into the big leagues.) Embarrassing? Sure. But kind of cool in a way too, because it meant you were growing up. That feeling you had the first day you wore your new “undergarment” to school and giggled and shared your secret with all your girlfriends, who were probably a little awed and a little jealous of your new grown-up girl status, is a memory tucked away for a lifetime.

Fast forward to the teenage years when your breasts became somewhat awkward to have thrusting out from your body, and suddenly they became the object of obsession by all the boys you knew - and some you didn’t.  Remember those days when you were talking to a boy and for some reason he could never maintain eye contact but seemed instinctively drawn to the area below your neck? I could write a treatise on breasts and their effect on boys and men, but I won’t. You get the picture.

As adult women we came to appreciate our breasts for the way they could turn men into stammering fools with just a hint of a sway under a well-fitted sweater, or the sudden appearance of a nipple swelling under a shirt in a cold room. Wonderbras, satin cups, push-ups, demi-mondes,  criss-cross, and racer back bras all gave us choices to enhance what Mother Nature intended as a feeding station and not an object of desire.

With motherhood, we came to view our breasts for the creations they were: a way to nourish and sustain our young by being a repository for milk. Breasts pumps, leak pads, nursing bras, and nipple cream were now added to our vocabulary, in addition to the words “swollen, sore and stretch marks.”

By the time we hit menopause our breasts have been used, manipulated, stimulated and fondled. They’ve swayed, bounced, jiggled, wiggled, shimmied, fed, suckled, and nourished. They’ve been taunt and firm and held up high. They’ve also been engorged, sore, swollen and dry. Age has made them droop and fatten, the skin no longer firm and supple, the underlying tissue now boggy and bumpy. Scary words like cancer, mastectomy and fibroids compel us to do Google searches, wondering if we could be afflicted and what we can do to: stop it, prevent it, cure it.

In the end, our breasts are an important part of who and what we are as females. Our breasts don’t define us,  but they are an integral part of what makes us female.

I’ve been involved in a love/hate war with mine since they emerged – unbidden –at 9. I’ve fought clothing wars with them, weight issues with them, and have bought and discarded more bras than a developing country’s national budget. They’ve been big, bigger, bigger, swollen, sore, lumpy and boggy. Fibroids live and take refuge in their inner recesses, and my yearly mammogram is painful enough to send me to a local bar for relief. ( Ever notice that bar and bra use the same letters? Weird, huh?)  

In the end, as I navigate through my menopause years, I am reconnecting with my breasts again and trying to keep them in optimal health and form. The next few blogs will be about – what else – our breasts, and the issues that concern them through these coming years.