When it comes to breasts, there are perky ones, ones that are droopy, lumpy, springy, teensy, full or pointy. The best thing I can say about mine is that they can clear a room.

I was thinking about this as I was deciding on an ensemble this morning. This was after spending probably a nanosecond too long trying to rationalize wearing yoga pants to a meeting. I couldn’t. I settled on comfortable slacks, and threw a summer blouse on. I’d forgotten about the neckline on the thing. It was plunging.

Was I revealing too much? Might something pop out unexpectedly?

Then my reflection and I shared a little laugh, because the only time something is likely to spring from my blouse is if I’m smuggling monkeys from a jungle.

When it comes the chest area, I’m under-endowed. In fact, I need to breathe deep and hold it in order to completely fill out an A-Cup. The lingerie section for people my size is a stone’s throw from the My Pretty Pony and Princess Ariel pajamas.

No one would ever look at me in that blouse and think: Dang, girl, be careful, ‘les you knock someone out with them knockers. Nope that was never going to happen.

And this after I showed such potential in that area, at least right at first.

I started developing early. By the seventh grade I had more going on than my eating-disorder-afflicted ballet instructor who frowned on bras. She said they created an unsightly line under our leotards. So, for a year or two, jumping around in class, I was little Miss Bouncy, with a whole lot more moving around than anyone probably wanted to witness.

In high school, I ran cross-country. This was prior to the invention of the functional exercise bra, so I ran in a tortuous contraption that rivaled the torpedo boob thing Madonna later popularized in her Blonde Ambition tour in the 1990s. It was pretty cutting edge, but not super supportive.

The point is, at the time I was developing as an adolescent, I was also wreaking havock on all the foundational musculature that would later prove important to keeping me from looking like a National Geographic swimsuit model.

I had started developing early, and then stopped early, but not before the damage was done.

This fact would render me a perpetual loser in the age-old boob comparison ritual typical of the high school girls’ post-gym class shower. My whole front section looked like it belonged to a middle-aged woman by the time I was sixteen. A set of desert-plate-sized-areolas didn’t help.

Then in college, there was the ‘pencil test.’ Proof positive that girls with any amount of free time will spend it destroying their self-esteem.

The contest had something to do with how many pencils one could carry, while standing normally, in the crook under her breast.

Don’t judge. It’s a life skill. Like using the proper silverware at dinner.

Anyway, the lack of ability to carry any pencils meant that you were either a boy or that you had the perkiest tits this side of puberty.

By that age, I could carry a couple pencils and a math text under one boob and probably a hero sandwich and a can of Diet Coke under the other if I tried.

Another life skill, I’m sure.

Things would never get any better short of surgical intervention.

Even with all the abuse they took, my breasts experienced moderate fame and popularity when they proved to be world-class lactators. I could nurse babies like a champ, and so breastfeeding was an experience I prolonged as long as possible. My kids were lucky I weaned them before eighth grade.

But weaning did happen. And then I got back into running (better bras these days). And stuff in that area just kept shrinking.

Today, I rival Grace Jones in my ability to wear a sport coat with absolutely nothing else without revealing anything except an exceptional lack of fashion sense.

But these things still have a purpose.

Every night we try like hell to enforce a 9 pm bedtime for the boys. It’s not that we give a rip about how much sleep they get. We just don’t want wait forever to be able to watch Orange is the New Black on Netflix without the need to explain the cultural value of soft core prison porn to a couple of impressionable adolescents.

As luck would have it, we still have an eleven year old who is mortified to witness people kissing on television, or catch one of us changing clothes.

Oh, yeah. We use that.

“You all can stay up as late as you want,” Mike will say to get bedtime ritual rolling. “Mom and I are just going to talk about stuff like boobies, so if that kind of thing doesn’t bother you, feel free to hang around.”

We don’t really talk about boobies, but the possibility will send certain people around here scrambling from the room, quick as a wink.

So, you know, boobies. The kind that will clear a room. I got ‘em right here.

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Don’t knock it. Just vote. You can do so as much as once a day. Thank you!

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photo by: ©BazzaDaRambler