Saggy Tits And The Implacable Id

I started writing a blog about how I stood in front of the bathroom mirror after my shower tonight to inspect the goods. David sidled up the computer and read over my shoulder.

"Don't write that." He said.

"What?"

"Don't say you look like Homer Simpson half-way through gender reassignment."

"Why not? It's my creative expression."

"No it's not."

"Please don't tell me what to write. And yes it is."

"No. It's not."

"Yes it fucking is."



I remember watching my mom get ready for work when she was a young nurse. She wore white nylons and had this way of sliding them up her legs so they made this pleasing sshhhhhhhh sound. It was the olden days, the nurses didn't wear scrubs back then but the lovely white button-up dresses with the matching caps that you only see now in porn mags. I remember her putting on the deodorant that smelled like icing sugar, the rigid camel bra.

She is little bit pregnant in this memory, too. Her belly perfectly swollen. She looks like she has a little cabbage in there. I am watching her stand in front of the mirror to button up the dress, brush her hair, put on the opal earrings her dead grandma left to her. She is looking at herself and smiling a bit, and then looking at me and saying something, something nice.

She was a beautiful woman who knew she was beautiful.

Just before my tenth birthday, my dad took me to Value Village in New Westminister to buy my first bra. I needed it. My boobs had bloomed overnight and were, I learned later, becoming a problem with my male teacher at school who felt very uncomfortable about my new breasts flopping about. He made a phone call to my mom at work. I guess I'd been doing cartwheels at recess with my shirt untucked or something, because otherwise the whole thing seems mighty creepy. Anyway, my mom had a chat with me about how it was my responsibility to take good care of my breasts now, and she promised we'd go bra-shopping and then to The Grey Mouse for tea that weekend. But somehow we ended up in Vancouver before we could do that. I don't remember why, but it was so, and at Value Village on that day just before my tenth birthday, I stood in the lingerie section with my dad, who looked at the floor all stern and anxious with his hands in his pockets.

"I don't know what size." I said.

"Just get the one you like," he said.

I found a training bra with giraffes on it, but it was too small. I wanted it anyway, I thought I could make it fit, but my dad said absolutely not, no giraffes.

I ended up with something else, I don't remember what. Something old-ladyish and scratchy. I suppose it did the job.

That night, my mom took me to see Phantom of the Opera. I wore a black dress and dangly earrings. "You look like you're eighteen!" My mom kept saying, "And that bra fits you like a glove!"

Fifteen years later, about a week before she died, one of the last things she said to me (in a morphine-induced state of delirium) was this:

"Hey Chelsea."

"Yeah?"

"You should put those tits on a stroller."

"What?"

"Get a stroller. For your tits, so you can move them around. They're big and saggy."


It's not something she would have normally said. But maybe it's something she would have thought and never said. I'll never know, because I never got to ask. When she was a new mom, she was beautiful and slim and free from the icky inconveniences of post-partum depression or dying parents.

Anyway.


I want to be my mother in 1984, putting on my slutty white nurse uniform, brushing my black hair and glancing at my little girl, sitting there in her pajamas on the bed, wide-eyed and astonished that anyone could ever be as lovely I am right now.