My grandma is an amazing person. She is funny and she is wise, she always has a good story to tell, and she makes one hell of a pork cutlet. Among her many talents, is a rather strange one – that lovely old woman can tell from a mile away if you’re wearing a bra or not.
Grandma must have likened sagging breasts to a woman’s failure, because I cannot tell you the number of times she pointed out to me as a child that when it came time for me to wear a bra, it was in my best interest to be straight up glued to that shit.
The last thing I wanted was to become a pair of hanging breasts with a head, and to avoid that fate I begged my mother for a training bra. She indulged my request, thinking it was cute that I wanted to dress up like a big girl.
She had no idea how serious this had become.
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| When's the best time to wear a bra? Trick question - all the time. I shared my wealth of training bra knowledge with all the girls at school. I knew it was the right thing to do so they could be as prepared as I was.   Remember that old-timey game of telephone? A kid would whisper a phrase to another kid and that kid would whisper it to the next kid, and so on down the line until the phrase reached the last kid who would tell the entire group what he had just heard. You always ended up a with a tangle of words that not only made zero sense, it was so far removed from the original phrase you had no hope in hell of even guessing what the words were actually supposed to be. I think we would have been better off if we played the game of telephone to talk about the bra.  
Apparently I hadn’t succeeded as much in preparing my female counterparts as I had in creating mass hysteria and confusing the shit out of Tim. Tim’s mother wasn’t too impressed, and she complained to the teacher, who filled my mother in on what had been going on. As mothers do, she allayed my fears about my body and laid to rest the myth behind the bra. We agreed that I would lay off the training bras for now. She also explained to me that when it was time to wear a bra, it was best to wear it under my clothes. There was still a part of me that was afraid of not heeding my Grandmother’s advice, and so any time we went to visit her, I made sure to wear my training bra, for good measure.
A few weeks later after school one day, as my mother was driving us home, I realised we were taking a wrong turn. "You missed our street, mom." She smiled at me through the rearview. "We're going to your grandma's for a visit." NO! A sense of overwhelming dread filled me. I wasn't wearing a bra. She was going to be disappointed and tell me about how my chest muscles would atrophy and I would need to carry my breasts over my shoulders just to get around. I really didn’t need any more insecurities at this point in my life so I knew I had to act, and act fast. Pulling into Grandma’s driveway, I bolted from the car and disappeared into the garage. My mom called after me. “Where are you going?” “I’ll be right back!” The dryer was running and that was perfect timing for me – a clean batch of laundry – surely there would be a bra in there I could borrow. Yes, it would be weird to put my grandma’s bra on… but this desperate time called for a desperate measure, so don’t fucking judge me. Well.. don’t judge me yet, anyway. Turns out there were no bras in there. So I had to improvise.
Yes, I wrapped the underwear around my chest, putting an arm through a leg hole, my head through another leg hole, making a knot to keep it all together – the most unsupportive, makeshift toga-like bra ever. But I was pretty sure I could get passed Grandma’s eagle eye because it wasn’t just a bare chest under there - and surely that had always been what tipped her off in the past. I walked into the kitchen where my grandmother and mother were sitting with a cup of coffee. I strutted up to them with confidence - puffed out my chest.  Without missing a beat, my grandmother took one look at me and said "Get that underwear off your chest and come play Scrabble." I still have no idea how she knew. |
