The Curious Case of My Disappearing Boobs
Missing: two once-perky 34Cs. Please return to owner, no questions asked!
I
sometimes forget, mid-shower, whether or not I shampooed my hair just
five minutes earlier. But almost 20 years since it happened, I still
recall the moment when my boobs truly "arrived."
My cup literally ran over. As a late bloomer, I'd been waiting for my boobs since I tore through the Judy Blume canon at age 11. Dear God, I don't really care about the period, but where are the hell is my rack? Breasts were a harbinger of womanhood, or at the very least teenhood. They were a sign that I'd one day shed my braces and bad "Rachel" haircut and graduate to my own phone line (never happened), a Sweet 16 at a neon-lit catering hall (definitely happened), and a social calendar stocked with dates. So when my knockers showed themselves in earnest that summer before ninth grade, I welcomed them with open arms and jazz hands.
But now, at 33, I'm once again left wondering where the hell my boobs are.
Some time in the 18 months since having my daughter, it came to my attention that my ample décolletage had gone missing. Once respectable 34Cs—a size seemingly always referred to as a "handful"—they'd shrunk from bonafide breasts to teeny titties. They could still be considered a handful…if that hand belongs to newborn baby.
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But pregnancy giveth boobs, and pregnancy can taketh away. Weight gain and increased estrogen in your body can up your cup size during pregnancy, Alyssa Dweck, MD, ob-gyn and author of V is for Vagina, tells me via e-mail. "Engorgement from milk letdown is most exaggerated as your brain/breasts/baby figure out how much milk to make," she says. But losing the baby weight (in my case, while screaming "Are you fucking serious?" at Tracy Anderson's punishing postpartum videos) can also mean losing boobage.
More significantly, "the skin of your breasts had been so stretched out during pregnancy and with nursing," she says, "that some of the elasticity is lost." This, Dweck explains, can create the "drooping" that makes breasts appear smaller. Luckily, because my ladies were never that big in the first place, it's not like they're now hanging at my waist. But it feels like a cruel twist that a year of bigger boobs came at price of smaller, more pancake-like ones now.
The irony isn't lost on me that as a teenager I saw breasts as pillowy symbols of womanhood, but now that I am an adult woman, a wife and mom, and an employed person, I am once again unbestowed. It's a friendly reminder to my 14-year-old self that boobs do not a woman make. I'm not going to beat myself up over my relative flatness this time around, listening to Tori Amos CDs and writing bad poetry like I did in junior high. I'm not especially happy that the boobs I once longed for have abandoned me. I liked them. We'd coexisted happily for decades. They'd always been there for me—especially in my twenties when I dug a low-cut, body-con LBD.
That said, it's also not lost on me that my boobs helped keep my daughter alive for almost three months, which is a pretty impressive feat. It's a fact that heartens me when I am looking at my chest in the mirror, shaking my head, and asking aloud, "Are you guys ghosting me?"
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