Beauty and the B(r)easts
Once upon a time, my mother thought her giant breasts were 32As. I was a knock-kneed thirteen-year-old, and I needed a clean bra from the laundry when she told me to just borrow one of hers. ‘We’re the same size, after all,’ she said, jiggling her giant bazookas next to my tiny teenage pimples. Something had clearly gone awry.
Mum’s sense of dimensions had been drastically altered by years of her older sister – a woman endowed with chesticles so huge that they began to eventually curve her spine, whispering to her, Gollum-like, in the bedroom they shared, that ‘dental floss with knots in it would do as a bra for you’. During her delicate formative years, Mother had been subjected to regular taunts about fried eggs on ironing boards while sitting down for lunch, and offered membership to the ltty Bitty Titty Brigade when she came in for dinner. By middle age, she’d become practically apologetic whenever anybody set eyes on her perfectly shapely frame. She considered her breasts a personal failure. It all came to a head that Tuesday when the laundry was late out of the dryer. Such was the success of her sister’s teasing, it turned out, that my poor mum had been squashing herself into teenage training bras for forty years, well after giving birth to two children and breastfeeding them to boot. Most people knew Auntie Susan as a formidable character, but nobody had quite realised the true extent of her powers until I peered into my mother’s underwear drawer. Amongst the Spanx, stockings, and seamless knickers was a terrifying truth in the form of a neatly folded row of A-cup brassieres. Their strained straps and misshapen holders spoke of decades of knocker oppression.
Something had to be done, and the solution came to me in a cold sweat a few nights later, as I lay contemplating the effects of squashing pumpkins into salt shakers. The only person with the courage and ability to tackle such a chronic case of funbag dysmorphia was the stern lady in the changing rooms at Marks & Spencer. Armed only with a measuring tape, she would surely set to work in dismantling Mum’s problems with proportion. An objective instrument of measurement would finally afford her the proof of her own body, and any doubts would be quelled by the measurer’s strident sense of purpose. The plan was watertight – tighter, indeed, than a 32A on a glamour model.
A few weeks later, we put the plan into action and slayed the beast of self delusion. Mum was officially declared a 34DD, to much aplomb, and picked out bras in her actual bra size for the first time in her life. Freed from the shackles of her previously undersized underwear, which had been leaving red welts along her sides for as long as she could remember, she finally saw her body for what it really was. Clothes fitted in ways that they had never fitted before; her revolutionised underwear drawer was a joy to behold. The spell had been broken.
As for me, well, I learnt from previous generations’ mistakes and got myself a measuring tape once I’d grown a pair. I live in blissful harmony with all of my bras, which live happily ever after, pressed against my chest. And I definitely can’t borrow my mother’s underwear anymore, which is really a great relief for all of us.
Like all good fairy tales, of course, this one wouldn’t be complete without a didactic conclusion. And so the moral of this story is that everyone can get silly about boobs, but it’s worth not being too silly about your own.