For the Girls

About two years ago my Mom bought me this really fantastic bra. We had been out shopping - she is the last victim standing who will still shop for bras with me, I think she may suffer from Stockholm Syndrome - and we found this black silk bra. Full support (a girl always needs all the support she can get), wide straps and, best of all, a hot pink embroidered butterfly right smack dab in the middle. Oh it was a glorious thing to behold - I took it in to the change room, tried it on for all of thirty seconds to make sure the girls would stay put and maybe even danced around for a little in it. Or maybe not, I’ll never say.
I got it home - and that butterfly really let me down in the thick of things, I must tell you. It kept waffling under the pressure, caving in on itself, letting the girls - well, letting the girls down, really. I’ve worn this bra once or twice, sacrificing any sort of comfort or modesty as I realign and re-adjust the gals every 20 minutes or so just to feel that butterfly flutter near my heart. Mostly now though it lays in the bottom drawer, or my ‘pretty bra graveyard’ as I’ve started calling it. It’s folded neatly, kept company by the pink lace demi bra, the lavender ‘extreme’ push-up bra that had me looking like the masthead of a ship, the black t-shirt bra with extra padding - tell me, why exactly do they pad bras that size? I’m fairly certain I have enough natural padding of my own.
Bra shopping, right? There is NOTHING worse, not root canals, not blind dates, not severe nail breakage. I’ve been tempted over the years to get properly fitted for a bra - after all, Oprah has done at least two specials on proper bra fit (did you know 85% of us are wearing the wrong size?) and she is Oprah. She knows things. But I’m a little afraid - Oprah was a size G, which means that the alphabet could quite possibly run out before they find my size. And I’ve looked through the stores - even on the bottom shelves in the bigger department stores (which is where they always keep the bigger sizes; it’s not humiliating enough to rifle through all of the boxed bras, they need to make you crawl in the dark for them as well), the biggest size they have is, like a D. Which just won’t do. Although, even if you find your size, chances are you won’t be that size in the next store or even necessarily if you try again tomorrow after you’ve downed an iced cappucino on the way to the mall.
Another thing - if you do ever manage to figure out what size bra you wear, if you get taped and measured and wrestled in to the right bra with the right straps which conceal the right amount of back fat, why do they only come in two colours? And why are the colours either white or the colour of nothingness? Forget about matching underwear - just go get yourself a pair of granny panties, I suppose. Then you’ve got your poor fella sitting next to you at the movies, watching some hot young starlet in her black lace panty set and he’s probably thinking “Oh yeah, I get to go home with Ms. Granny Panties/Burlap Bra”.
Of course, let’s not forget the terminology - I swear you need a degree in bra-translation to figure out what you need. A minimizer, a maximizer (because if the girls are small, they need to look bigger and if the girls are big, you’ve gotta make them look smaller), balconette, demi-cup, underwire, sport, full-coverage, push-up, extreme push-up, plunge, wire-free, padded. And one of these is the type of bra that will flatter you the most, will have you standing a little taller and feeling a litter curvier, thinner, whatever you like. But no one is telling you which one - you must guess.
It doesn’t really help that we are all so - aware - of our breasts either. Whether they are too small, too large, a strange shape, lopsided, two different sizes, so much of our feminine strength and power is wrapped up in them. So maybe that’s why we willingly shell out hundreds (that’s right husbands, we all lied. That bra didn’t cost 9.99. It was 84.99 on sale) to see them treated right. That’s also why we wash them like we wash our newborn babies, by hand and with love - the wedding dress would go in the dryer before the ‘smalls’.
There is always hope, though. The secret is - not to keep it a secret. If you find a great bra tell everyone. Tell them where you bought it. Tell them why you love it. Maybe even tell them your size - it would be very cleansing, trust me. The perfect bra is the Holy Grail. So let’s all soldier on, girls. For the girls.