Brava!

In 2023 my essay, “It Wasn’t The Bra” was selected for the YWCA of the Greater Capitol Region’s eighth annual event, Brava!: a night of memoir about the place of bras in our lives. Ticket proceeds and bra donations benefited women in need via YWCA. The event was co-hosted by renowned memoir coach and author, Marion Roach Smith. Eleven writers read their pieces in front of a live audience at the event. Read mine below:

It wasn’t the bra that did it. The bra was just a portal.

I must have been about eight years old when I decided I wanted a bra more than anything else in the world. I was too shy to ask my mother for one. My sister, three years older, hated her first bra. In defiance she cut off the straps, rendering it unwearable. She couldn’t have guessed that I, meanwhile, was eyeing an overflowing bin of scrap fabric in Mom’s sewing room, trying to figure out how I could make one. Contemplating a swath of pale yellow linen, I imagined the outline I would cut—a simple design, U-shaped on top, straight on bottom, with straps the width of three of my fingers. But did I yet know how to wield Mom’s sewing machine? Or was hot glue my plan?

I never even made it to the scissors. Perhaps my sister was busy with them.

I think my first bra finally arrived crumpled up in a bag of hand-me-down clothes. It was a “training” bra, one of those wannabe bras for prepubescent girls who don’t yet have boobs to fill them. It reminds me of when I was six years old and my friend and I took our shirts off and put cloth headbands around our chests, the headbands barely wide enough to cover our bug-bite-sized nipples. The training bra was like that, but with thin, spaghetti-like straps.

Why was I so excited to wear a bra? It very likely had to do with the fact that all my friends were wearing one, and I would sooner take a dodgeball to the face than be discovered as the only girl without a bra when we changed clothes for gym class. And boy, did I hate dodgeball. But I think it was also because I imagined it would make me feel more grown-up, more mature, more important. More like a woman. I can see myself walking into my fifth-grade classroom on the day of my Bra Debut, shoulders back, a subtle line showing through my shirt around my rib cage, the empowering pressure of it on my skin.

Bring it on, Algebra.

Soon I’d have the real thing—the cups, the underwire, the adjustable straps. The full weight of womanhood. Oh, how I longed for that weight. But I didn’t understand it. I was just in training then.

As my breasts became heavier, so did my life. The training, it seemed, had done little to prepare me. Fully filling a B cup, I walked between buildings on my college campus, talking to Mom on the phone.

“When will I finally feel grown-up?” I asked.

“I didn’t until I had a baby,” she said.

Next came a white bra under a white dress, then a lacy blue, the kind that is put on only to be taken off as quickly as possible.

Then I was in the hospital and a nurse placed a tiny new person on my naked chest and I’d never felt so young, my breasts never so heavy. The click of the clasp on my nursing bra became as familiar as my daughter’s cries, on again, off again, through all hours of the day and night.

Today I am thirty-one years old, an age that, as a child, I never imagined being. I had only fantasized about those glamorous milestones I assumed would happen in my teens and 20s. They did, and now I am here. I am still here.

When I look in the mirror I can see the fifth-grader, especially in my size A bra where there’s a little space between the inside of the cup and my skin. My body tells the story of what womanhood has asked of me. And if we walked around my house I could show you all the gifts (mainly people) it has given me. But what I couldn’t show you, I would tell you, and that is this: Somewhere between my very first bra and the one I wear today, womanhood has given me the understanding that there are no destinations in life, only journeys.

From here I can see that the bra was not a portal itself, but the entry to a portal, and the portal is not a portal, but a never-ending path, on which there is one rule: You must keep moving forward.

But you can always look back.