When I was very little, I desperately wanted breasts. Most little girls do, I think. It’s the outward sign of being “grown up”. Apparently I was also a little stupid because I had no idea that nipples and breasts were related — the only part of my chest that even faintly stuck out was the bottom of my rib cage so I was sure that’s where breasts would eventually form. (In my defense, to my recollection, I’d never seen naked adult female breasts before — my mother didn’t even breastfeed.) I tried to help nature out by hanging from the kitchen counter edge by my rib cage.
Be careful what you wish for.
By the time I was 13 years old, I was a 38D. Nice bras were hard to come by in sizes larger than, say, a 36C back then so I was relegated to wearing very sturdy, matronly bras. The “girls” continued to grow as puberty progressed. (And they grew pretty quickly — my first ever stretch marks were on my breasts and occurred when I was in my teens and not overweight at all.) By the time I was 16 and out of high school, they were large enough to cause me intense chest muscle pains (think pectoral charley horse) if I ran across the street. At some point in the 80s, companies started making really nice bras in larger sizes. Underwire became my friend; I forgave it the occasional dig into my side. Pain meant support and support meant the “girls” were happy.
As time went on and I gained weight, my chest got larger along with me. At some point I gave up even trying to fight gravity. I settled for adequate support and a matronly (in the worst possible sense of the word) figure because it was just impossible to find a decent bra in my size. Nice looking bras now are easily found in sizes into the 50s and cup sizes into K and well beyond. Unfortunately, there seems to be a point (somewhere around 46DDD or so) where most companies just stop making underwire bras in large sizes and revert back to soft cup bras. I don’t know the reasoning behind it. To my mind, larger equals a need for more support, not less.
But, alas, if you are, say, a North American size 48J, good support is hard to come by. If you were to go to one of my favourite online bra shops, for example, this is all that’s available in that 48J size. All soft cup, with really limited support. They do in a pinch but they don’t do enough to counteract that evil destroyer of bazooms, gravity. I have managed to find one or two underwire bras, but, really? Is that all there is for us?
Perhaps I need to learn to sew so that I can make my own.
(Ooh, just had a thought. Wouldn’t it be awesome if breast implants could be filled with something like Helium? Yeah, I know Helium itself would be a bad choice because of risks, danger, blah, blah, but how insanely great would it be to have them essentially carry themselves? Short of hiring someone to gently hold your breasts everywhere you went, there’s no other way to experience frontal weightlessness (without the extremeness of, say, a full double mastectomy). OK, I know you could probably find someone who’d hold them up for free — for a little while, at least — but would you really want that person touching you?)
Life Begins at 41...or maybe 43 