ABREAST OF THE BREAST

Breasts and Our Need to Love Those That Adorn Our Bodies

They respond to our love and patience

My friend, Diana Ivy, and I are in line at a food tent serving fried chicken during a festival. When we get to the front, the server says,

“You’ll have to wait for breasts.”

Diana answers,

“I’ve waited for breasts my whole life.”

We all laughed. I felt her pain. I was a long-time member of the itty bitty titty committee. When I weighed barely 103 pounds, they were nearly non-existent. I always lose weight in my breasts first.

So I learned from my therapist to focus on my good legs and cute butt while looking in mirrors naked — yes, that was a therapy assignment — instead of staring with sadness at my tiny tits. The weight was a result of a divorce at age 26, which is also why I was in therapy.

I once threatened to take a pool cue to the side of the head of a guy cat-calling a friend’s big breasts and then making fun of my tiny ones, but that’s a story for another time. Therapy helped. I swear.

Fast forward fifteen years. I finally got pregnant at 40 years of age. To my awe and amazement, my breasts grew!

The cute perky ones I sported all my life began to resemble the full, rounded melons I always knew I was meant to have. I was delighted. Finally! The wait was over.

Everything about being pregnant made me feel like a fertility goddess — fully feminine and powerful. If I’d started in my twenties, there would be more children than my one son — I enjoyed that state of being so much.

As it was, I breast-fed my son solely for five months, and then on a diminishing schedule until he was three. He was and is a big boy, and I attribute that to breast-feeding. On the flip side, we looked pretty funny with his legs reaching below my knees when I carried him.

When he was three, and again when he was six, I had miscarriages.

As a result of the combination of pregnancies and breast-feeding, I maintained lactation for a long time. With lactation comes enlarged breasts. That may be why, unlike some women, I didn’t lose the larger breasts the initial pregnancy gave me. While I had to wait for breasts, all the perks were worth it.

Clothes fit better. My top matched my bottom. I filled out a bathing suit. I got to experience the exquisite pleasure of nursing a child.

As an older woman, and someone with injuries and living through a pandemic during the last few years, I’ve gained weight. Not that I ever want to see 103 again. That was post-divorce weight in my twenties, and I looked like a feral cat. However, with my belly now reaching forward to match the outline of my breasts, and the breasts now a 36D, I’m once again struggling to be happy with my body.

As I begin a regime of training, working out, and dancing again, I hope to release the belly fat that is beginning to cause me physical issues. Will the breasts go as well? Very possibly.

Am I okay with that? I am.

These breasts have served me well. First as the small perky ones that didn’t get in the way as I trained in my martial art Aikido. Second as the motherly, fecund ones that sustained the life of my son.

Robert Heinlein once had a character state to his spouse “I love your baby-chewed breasts.”

When I read that as a young woman, I wanted to some day hear that from a man who loved me. While I haven’t heard the equivalent from a partner, I say it to myself.

I love these baby-chewed breasts. And that’s what really counts.