A Bra-less Wonderland

 

I wished for breasts back when I was young, clueless of what I was asking for, and flat as a board. I remember being excited for breasts and my period and for the life of me I have no idea why. I do remember my mom cautioning me to be careful what I wished...remembering both of my grandmothers, I should have heeded her warning. But no, in my per-pubescent mind breasts would mean something.

And they do mean something – just not whatever magical long forgotten thing I thought back then.

Breasts for me have meant expensive bras, ill-fitting clothes, back pain, and a self consciousness that left me bundled in baggy or flowing clothes for a good bit of my life. It has left people staring, both lustfully and distastefully, at my chest and commenting on it without provocation. My grad school dean once looked at my shirt and then said with a certainty that implied we’d discussed this (we hadn’t) “so you’ll be going home to change before tonight.” That particular comment stained my brain in part because I'd had a conversation with myself about wearing that shirt and NOT draping myself in a larger shirt over it, before I'd left the house that day. She was the embodiment of my own self-conspicuousness.

The think about large breasts that folks that don’t have them don’t seem to understand is that you can wear the exact same shirt as someone with smaller breasts and what is “cute” on them is somehow “lewd” on you. Sometimes it is the way breasts pull the fabric taut against your chest, the cleavage that manifests in a V neck, or the dilemma of tent to accommodate the breasts or poppin’ fresh dough to fit the torso.

I maneuvered these options for most of my adult life. Smoothing my breasts into expensive uncomfortable bras and then fretted over what “message” my shirt or dress was sending because my body couldn’t just exist, it must be telegraphing codes to the world around me.

And then COVID hit and the extent of my adventures for the first year was trips to the grocery store. So I stopped.

Just like that.

I stopped wearing bras.

The first time I ventured out to the grocery story my mom, who is only marginally taller than breast level with me, looked at obviously bra-less chest and said, “no bra.” It was both statement and question. And when she looked at my face she had her answer.

In a moment of clarity that should have been obvious to me years ago, II realized the attention my breasts get without a bra is really no different than what they get when plastered to my chest. The only difference is that with one I'm imprisoned in a device whose only attribute (other than aesthetics) is the 15 seconds of near-orgasmic gratification when I take it off at the end of the day.

After-all, I was wearing a bra when my boss sexually harassed me years ago (in my father’s old polyester bowling shirt no less), and when a fellow professional at a job fair asked me lewdly if “I knew what I was doing to him in that dress (that came to my knees and buttoned past any cleavage)”. And I was very much wearing a bra when the dean inferred the inappropriateness of my shirt which really was a discomfort with the breasts inside of it.

So now, with the exception of professional settings, I mostly go bra-less.

Squarely in my 40 and closer to 50 than not, I’m trying to make peace with the body I was born in, its jiggles and handles, and yes, its curves – no longer imprisoned but instead set free.

Bras and consent

 

I saw him as I rounded the corner. A sunny day on a quiet street. I wanted to be on his side of the street but I heard him through my headphones talking, I presumed to me, and so decided to keep my path. Off went the earphones but my already brisk pace remained steady. I held him in my peripheral vision, a habit borne of experience.

He crossed to my side of the street. His pace faster now, or maybe I imagined it. I heard his voice, although now I was unsure who he was talking to. He mumbled something about meeting me at the trashcans, just as I approached a few trashcans stashed on the side of an apartment. And without a second thought I jogged. Jogged right through a parking lot, around a corner and straight to the busiest street I could find. I’ve long forfeited the fear of hurting someone’s feeling.

It has been a while since I've felt the unpleasant internal rush from a stranger’s unknown intentions. Pandemic living maybe? I don’t know why, but as I revisit today’s encounter I am thankful for the reprieve.

Before I'd left for the store I'd debated wearing a bra. One of the most liberating things about COVID has been my renunciation of bras (much to my mom’s dismay). Underwire is the devil and bras are, by design, binding. Around the house and family, I am “born free”. With strangers and job interviews, I conform to the norms of our day. But the store? The store is up for debate. Had I driven I'd likely have kept my free status and not thought much about it. In the tank-top I'm wearing I'm as likely to get stared or commented on with or without so, why bother?

But walking demands I consider what type of attention I might arouse from strangers when I don’t have an easy escape path. So I put on the bra.

And yet…

I realize that my senses might be heightened because of a recent argument I had a friend. An argument about...consent. Or rather power. Maybe intentions? An argument that has left me struggling to respond to him when he reaches out.

It started with the idea that some advances, man to woman, are unwanted. Especially in secluded places or late hours. He argued that it was unfair to “forbid” a man from approaching a woman and it made every man out to be a predator and every woman his victim. He questioned rape statistics and when our waiter, a complete stranger, disclosed her own victimization he brushed that off as anecdotal. Never mind the feelings of the person he’s approaching, he centered his feelings of “I want”. Desire trumping fear. Power usurping discomfort.

I cursed at him and fumed. A “fuck you” that echoed across the patio where we sat. Not my finest hour but it felt willful. It felt cruel. It felt dangerous.

We managed to find a stopping point. I don’t remember how. I apologized for the cursing but not the sentiment that caused it. I couldn’t I apologize for that because I don’t know a woman who hasn’t been effected in some way by the power dynamics of a man’s unwanted attention. The need to smile as he compliments because she doesn’t know how he’ll take rejection (but can’t smile too much or she’ll be accused of leading him on). The impulse to have sex even if she didn’t want to because now he’s aroused and she doesn’t know how he’ll take a “no” when he feels owed a “yes” (and acquiescing feels safer). A brisk run through a brightly lit neighborhood (because she’s also had a man angrily scream “raggedy bitch” at her after he followed her in the dark and rebuffed his advances. Or the hands on her hips, her butt, the “just playing” from friends.

So I put on a bra to go to the store.

It changed nothing. There was still unwanted attention, still words I didn’t request. It changed nothing except if this walk hadn’t ended with my possible misunderstanding of this man’s intentions or my ability to outrun him, if something awful and awfully common had happened, a bra might have rebuffed at least one extra injury, “well what do you expect, look how you are dressed?”

Crisis in the Middle

Midlife crisis has always been painted in shades of flashy cars and infidelity. Or maybe that’s all I remember from a time when midlife seemed like an impossible eternity from my experience in the world. And now...now I am square in the middle of life. An apt place for a crisis of my own. Only mine doesn’t look like any of the templates I've watched in bad 80s movies.

Instead, my crisis sits at the intersection of grief and change.

Of course, with closer inspection, most midlife crises probably meet that same criteria. The only difference now is the preponderance of crises that are larger than what I can fold my arms around and trace my own steps to how exactly I got here.

Not that I can’t trace any parts. Some have my distinct dancing footprints in the sand.My choices, my consequences. But others...others wear a pandemic’s face mask and play the theme music for Red Dawn, re-heating the Cold War to temperatures I'd prefer not to experience.

There are the more mundane of midlife follies. The ones that no one will write about or remember when I die, or even next year if my life plays nice and stops straying so waywardly from expectations: sudden (though no longer new) unemployment, my dad’s surgery, trying to forge new friendships with my unsure footing.

The marvel of this moment in my life is that as hard as it feels, as fragile as I feel in it, most people are just as fragile. My woes are no greater and of no more importance than someone struggling with small children, grad school with a shitty professor, or adolescence as the world whirls feverishly on its axis (with second by second video updates on the turmoil). So many people are hanging precariously by a prayer (for the faithful) or bewildered tenacity (for the heathens) as the winds of circumstance tangle all our strings into complicated knots.

The reality is that a midlife crisis is only memorable for its timing. Unsure and unmoored in your 20s and no one blinks. Twenty-two, hell, even 28, are not ages where folks assume everything is figured out.

But 46?

As uncomfortable as this space I'm occupying is, I can’t say I'd do anything different.One thing different means everything is different and that seems excessive even in my midlife crisis fantasy life.

And still…and still…

There is no quick fix. Nothing to soothe the sorrow or quell the rage of this strange space I find myself navigating. There is laughter, and intermittent tears. There is more than fleeting uncertainty and equal parts trust that my world (if not the wider world mired in plague and war) will sort itself out and I'll find my way.

That doesn’t make this space in time any easier. Doesn’t make my daily frustrations and fear any less palpable. But it doesn’t make it any less important either. Even if it only means something to me. Even if it only matters in this brief moment in the greater expanse of my life.

Food is my Mother Tongue

 

I introduced my family to a catchy, and oh so annoying children's song so they could learn to greet my family in South Africa. They sang it endlessly for three solid weeks. Even after we moved from a Sotho area to a Zulu one where the greetings changed. They sing it to this day at the slightest provocation.

“Thobela. Thobela. Thobela. Le ki. Le ki. Le ki. Regona recaralina. Regona recaralina.” I can still hear them in my head. But I can’t blame them. My aptitude for SeSotho was less than marginal on my best days so I didn’t have much else (language-wise) to teach them.

Despite my near obsession with travel, language is not one of my super powers. I learn the basics of course. Hello, goodbye, thank you. Such simple gestures, despite being basic decency, go so far in conveying goodwill on my part and receiving it from others. But unlike my friend who speaks seven languages fluently (and at least three additional one passably) or the average South African adult living in my old village who speak at least three, and my original host-dad who spoke all 11 official South African languages, I’m mostly a stereotypical monolingual American. A little Spanish to get by...not much more.

I do speak food though.

I don’t mean I know the names of things. Although I do my best to be familiar with dishes and the regions they are from, key ingredients and local variations on a theme. But when I say I speak food I really mean I am all in and want to try local food the way the folks in that place eat it.

Many people look up tourist hot-spots or historical monuments when they go someplace new. I research local delicacies. What do you eat and how do you eat it?

In Japan that involved discovering many folks take their plum wine with ice or water. In Vietnam I ended up eating strawberries with chili salt and nuoc cham (in Dalat) and toasting “yo” every time the family that invited me into their home for a party, filled my shot glass with local brew. I amused my village in South Africa when I first arrived because at a community function where everyone was eating with their hands they handed me a spoon (for some reason everyone in my village assumed Americans eat everything with spoons) and I instead followed their lead and dug in with my hand.

It doesn’t mean I love everything I'm offered, just that more times than not, I’m gonna eat what you give me and I gonna look for what you (person in a place I’m not from) eat.

Of course that bleeds over into my cooking. Experiencing a taste of something different often leaves me wanting more of it. But depending on where you are in America, you may not find what you are looking for.

I’m lucky, Houston is one of the most diverse places in America. I can find most things here without much effort. But even so, sometimes you have to know where to look. Pre-COVID my sister took me to a Vietnamese buffet spot. Fresh from my trip to Vietnam at the time I was expecting the usual fare. Instead I found dishes I had in the Mekong Delta- dishes I’d never seen on Vietnamese menus (in America) before. I was glee-filled, immediately transported back to buying fresh fruit from a floating market and watching the sun sink into the river at dusk.

I’ve loved dim sum for decades now. Ever since friends in Dallas introduced it to me. I’m pretty adept and can handle my own with a crush of carts and the soft tofu lady drilling daggers into me hoping I’ll capitulate and order some. But once I went with a friend of a friend. Luther, had lived in China for some years. So when the carts came around with something he wanted and he was offered the top steaming basket he smiled and shook his head no and pointed at the one below it. The next round of food he repeated this. By the third round there was no reason, the server smiled at him knowingly and reached for a lower (hotter) basket and placed it on our table with a knowing smile. Luther spoke food.

Like greeting someone in their mother tongue instead of expecting them to greet you in yours, knowing and loving someone’s food is a way to convey not only that “I see you” but that “I honor you and yours” too.

Surgical Reality

 

K-Pop blares behind me. An attempt at distraction.

Not far from here someone is cracking my father’s chest in an attempt to keep him healthy. And while I know this, the trying to keep him healthy part, I am fixated instead on his chest. Fixated on the heart they will slice into. The one that has loved me since before I was born.

I wish I was resolute in faith enough to embrace the full-throated hubris that knows everything will be ok but...he’s my daddy. Even in my middle-age he is still my daddy. Even the possibility of a world without him in it throws me off kilter.

He, of course, is a man of faith and logic. He understands that worrying and projecting won’t change anything, what is written for him is written for him. So these past few weeks he’s been his usual silly, funny, balanced self.

I know he’s right. I know. And yet…

Tomorrow I have a job interview and I asked the person scheduling if we could delay a little. Told her my dad would be coming out of surgery and still in ICU. She was resolute – they have needs and I am not the only potential solutions to them.

The world keeps turning even as mine slows... as I wait for news that my father --whose face I wear, who smells of Speedstick, who makes the best cheese toast I’ve ever tasted, who sharpens my knives “just cuz” when he putzes around my kitchen-- is recovering well. The world keeps spinning full speed even as I try to find my balance and catch my breath.