Summary

A mother reflects on her journey from having small, gravity-defying breasts to embracing her postpartum body with its changed, saggy breast appearance after multiple pregnancies and breastfeeding.

Abstract

The author shares a personal narrative about her transformation in body image, starting from a time when she had very small breasts that didn't require a bra to her post-pregnancy experience where her breasts enlarged significantly and then became saggy after breastfeeding multiple children. Despite the physical changes, she has come to accept and love her body, deciding against breast augmentation and embracing her natural appearance. The article includes humorous space metaphors to describe her breast changes and a tongue-in-cheek decision tree about bra-wearing, while also touching on societal expectations of women's bodies and the importance of self-acceptance.

Opinions

The author initially felt self-conscious about her small breast size, associating larger breasts with attractiveness and womanhood.
She experienced a significant change in her body during pregnancy, with her breasts enlarging and later becoming saggy after breastfeeding, which she describes with humorous astronomical references.
The author values her body's natural changes and functionality, particularly its ability to nourish her children, over societal ideals of beauty.
She rejects the idea of getting breast implants, preferring to embrace her body as it is, including its "craggy terrain" and the effects of gravity.
The author promotes a message of self-love and body acceptance, suggesting that her husband should appreciate her body or focus on other aspects of it if he doesn't like her postpartum breasts.
She pokes fun at the idea of bras and the societal pressure to wear them, especially in the context of her liberal, feminist community in Santa Cruz.

GRAVITY

Learning to Love My Saggy Boobies After Babies

This mom’s still got it going on

“All we are is dugs in the wind.” -Kansas (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

I was a carpenter’s dream.

Until I was pregnant, I never had boobs — not through puberty, and not afterward. I sported a pair of freakish, dime-sized nipples, and a cup size that was smaller than that of many men I knew — especially the ones who could put up 200 lbs on the bench press.

My nips defied gravity. Somehow, they pointed up. Straight out on a bad nip day.

We all know that bodies come in every shape and size, but the entire contents of my bra could’ve fit in the indentations of a miniature cupcake tin. It was that “bad.”

But it wasn’t bad. The good news about my scarce boobage was that I didn’t have to wear a bra.* I even went topless at a (very small) pool party in my friend’s backyard once. I figured if people didn’t want to see my itty bitty kitty titties, they should just look away.

“You’re gonna get flat, saggy t*ts when you get old,” warned a male friend, who couldn’t possibly have had a vested interest in such concerns. He seemed offended by people who didn’t tamp down their THO** with a bra.

“No, I won’t,” I countered. “You’ve got to have boobs to have saggy ones.”

Even going on birth control didn’t make my bosom multiply into the ample handfuls I’d assumed to be attractive. I was athletic and reasonably smart but often felt bad about myself for my lack of fleshy champagne glasses. I wanted nips that were closer to the diameter of, well, if not silver dollars, at least quarters.

Having had no cleavage to speak of, I longed to be taken seriously as a woman — or maybe even just to look like I was older than twelve.

Moons Over my Boobehs

When I had a baby, everything changed — including my love for overarching space metaphors.

My pregnancy hormones launched me all the way to the Kuiper Belt. My boobs exploded by several sizes — a boobsplosion, if you will — or twin supernovas, for the astronomically inclined. I got stretch marks where smooth skin had been. Not only did my nipples change from Plutos to Saturns, they now had circumstellar discs more far-flung than Astro’s frisbee.

And when my first three (closely spaced) pregnancies and accompanying years of breastfeeding were over, a pair of sad, crepey sacs replaced the bright little half-orbs that once rested there.

Let’s leave Uranus out of this.

Not-so-Heavenly Bodies

If my first three births and breastfeedings caused a gravitational shift….after six babies, my boobs no longer knew which way was up. The poles reversed! And where before there was a big bang, there now was a vacuum. A change in directionality and volume.

A moist, interstellar…never mind.

I would post tit pics here for an objective before-and-after. In the name of science. But…I don’t actually have any topless photos of myself when I was twenty (I know, I know, but I was young and a lot less exhibitionistic then.)

You’ll have to take my word for it.

Decisions, Decisions

Where does all of this flopping around leave me? I have developed a handy-dandy decision tree for whether or not to wear a bra on a given day. Behold:

The liquid on the top of the paper is NOT breastmilk — sorry, fetishists. (Author’s Photo and Drawing)

Rounding it All Out

Mark me — I will never mar my body with fake boobies. My family lived in a bedroom community of Los Angeles for nearly a decade, but I never saw a pair of fake ones that I liked. There’s nothing wrong with breast implants, per se. I just like my body the way it is. It fed and nourished people for months and years and decades and celestial epochs. Its craggy terrain has supported alien life forms. This body obeys the fickle laws of gravity, but it’s mine.

Besides. What more justification do you need for loving yourself than just because?

And f*ck putting bags of saline in my chest, only for them to burst when I almost drop the bench press bar on myself during CrossFit.***

If my husband doesn’t like my breasts in all their saggity glory, he can squeeze away at my buttcheeks, instead.

Self-love wins.

*I’m a feminist who lives in Santa Cruz! Women don’t shave their pits here, and then they dye their armpit bushes pink. See also: Bra Decision Tree, above.

**Titty Hard-On, for those of us who were never competitive swimmers stuck in cold water. (Fun Fact: According to my husband, some club swim teams in Denmark let the women swim topless while they train!)

***My mom popped her pretend boobies, allegedly due to powerlifting a large patient in the ER. Also, I have never done CrossFit, but someday I might, okay?

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