At thirteen, I looked like a nine-year-old. A brilliantly fit, streamlined, gazelle of a nine-year-old who could do sixteen consecutive feather-light back handsprings and come up barely out of breath. And I loved it. I was short, thin, curveless, flexible enough to frighten people because the positions I thought were fun ways to take a nap, they were sure must be painful, and my idea of feminine beauty was Nadia Comaneci in the 1976 films of her Olympic parallel bars routine.
I started to need a bra at fourteen and resisted kicking and screaming. I got too tall for gymnastics less than a year later. I took to wearing loose sweaters and crying when I saw dance movies. I wouldn't wear a bra regularly until I got to college, and I did so then only with enormous resentment. And then I started wearing minimizers.
It took having a baby and nursing her to make me feel at all happy about the fact that I own breasts, and I still think I could've done the same job with a lot less material in them. Someday, when I'm sure I've borne and fed all the children I am going to, I will get surgery to bring them down to a size I like. Meantime, I still wear minimizers, and button-down shirts that keep me from looking quite so big.
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Date: 2005-06-01 10:16 pm (UTC)At thirteen, I looked like a nine-year-old. A brilliantly fit, streamlined, gazelle of a nine-year-old who could do sixteen consecutive feather-light back handsprings and come up barely out of breath. And I loved it. I was short, thin, curveless, flexible enough to frighten people because the positions I thought were fun ways to take a nap, they were sure must be painful, and my idea of feminine beauty was Nadia Comaneci in the 1976 films of her Olympic parallel bars routine.
I started to need a bra at fourteen and resisted kicking and screaming. I got too tall for gymnastics less than a year later. I took to wearing loose sweaters and crying when I saw dance movies. I wouldn't wear a bra regularly until I got to college, and I did so then only with enormous resentment. And then I started wearing minimizers.
It took having a baby and nursing her to make me feel at all happy about the fact that I own breasts, and I still think I could've done the same job with a lot less material in them. Someday, when I'm sure I've borne and fed all the children I am going to, I will get surgery to bring them down to a size I like. Meantime, I still wear minimizers, and button-down shirts that keep me from looking quite so big.