to boob or not to boob

When I was 15 my mother got a boob job. While I was still waiting for the boob fairy (a long and ultimately disappointing wait), full of angst as only a 15 year old girl can be, my mother went out and bought herself a pair. Her need to be the center of all male attention caused her to indulge herself almost as soon as the silicon implants were invented by a pair of Houston plastic surgeons. Her and all the strippers.

It wasn't embarrassing enough for her to have done it at all, she had it done during the summer and we spent our summers at the beach where we had a vacation home. My mother could never be called demure and she paraded around in her bikini (or what passed for one in 1965 Houston TX) before she even got the bandages off. And back then there were a lot of bandages. They made a big 'X' across her chest so if I had had any hope of people just not noticing that she went from flat chested to having a couple of cantaloupes, they were dashed. The bandages might as well have been a neon sign saying 'look at me'.

Nowadays, of course, a boob job is no big deal. Nobody even bats an eyelash but in 1965 they were mostly unheard of and since my mother didn't have the good grace to be furtive about it I had to endure the snickers of the summer teenage boys and girls. To say I was mortified would have been putting it mildly.

So while my mother was busy flaunting her new boobs, I became a life long member of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee. I gave up wearing a bra around 20 because at that time they didn't make one small enough to fit me and I refused to wear a training bra all my life. Even the padded bras tended to crumple under my shirts. Most guys have bigger boobs than me.

The only time I ever had boobs was for about four or five years when I was pregnant and nursing. They were enormous. There's a picture somewhere of me nursing my daughter and my boob was bigger than her head. By the time I weaned my son, I was ready for the boobs to go away. Later in my life when I started going to the gym regularly I developed what I referred to as 'faux' cleavage.

There are some advantages to having very small breasts. The above mentioned not having to wear a bra and not having to wear tight binding tops when I exercise or participate in athletic activities. I've never had a back ache from carrying around all that weight on my chest. I've never been embarrassed by having an errant boob slip out of a top that barely conceals them. They will never ever sag and guys look at my face when they talk to me.

Of course, there are disadvantages too. Dresses and women's blouses don't fit me very well and me in a bikini is a joke but I eventually got old enough where that part of my body in a bikini was the least of the problem with wearing one. Getting a mammogram is an exercise in futility, frustrating for me and the technician. When I was young and going to clubs guys never ever asked me to dance and because I didn't have big boobs I had to develop other ways of attracting guys' attention. Oh wait, that might be an advantage.

And my mother's boobs? They didn't sag either, being a bag of goo, but by the time she was an old lady, they had slid down to her belly button. That right there is reason enough for me to never get an implant.