The Perils of Bra Shopping

I’ll begin this essay - short story with a warning: If you’re a prude, you might be offended, and in the Deep South, we ladies are taught never to offend intentionally, so you are forewarned!

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with my breasts. You see, they began growing when I was just nine or ten, and this totally went against my plans of turning into a boy. Yes, I wanted to be a boy! More specifically, I wanted to be a cowboy. I dreamed of riding wild broncs, roping steers, driving cattle, and chasing outlaws through the Badlands. How could I do these activities with such flesh protruding from my chest? Remember, this was in the sixties – before women’s lib. Little girls weren’t allowed to do such things.

For years, I prayed every night for God to turn me into a boy. When I began to get my boobies, however, I finally accepted that this dream would not be realized. I was in denial for a while. I wore tight undershirts to try to hide the hateful breasts, but this didn’t work for long. By the sixth grade, I was forced to wear a bra.

Oh, how I hated those bras! I was the only girl in my class who had to wear one, and my boobies were getting a lot of attention. All the boys wanted to touch them. Of course, they knew better than to be overt, so they would try to “accidentally” brush up against them when we were standing in the lunch line or milling about in the hall, waiting to change classes.

By the time I reached the seventh or eighth grade, something happened. I no longer wanted to be a boy. Instead, I wanted to have a boyfriend. I began to realize that my budding breasts were an asset. I liked older guys, and my boobs helped me attract them.

As I grew older, my bazooms grew with me. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, they were 38 Ds. I got married at eighteen and had my first child at nineteen, and by then, the boobies were ginormous. By the time I hit thirty, I was in an F cup. They continued expanding to their present size – a GG cup.

Have you ever shopped for a bra with a double-G cup?? It ain’t easy, my friends! For one thing, they’re devilish hard to find. And for another, they’re very expensive. Most of them are hideous, too.

I remember one day my best guy pal and I went shopping at a big mall when I was on a bra quest. I was perusing the bras on display when the saleslady approached.

“May I help you?”

“Yes, I need a bra.”

“Well, we have several nice ones here,” she explained.

“No, I need a real bra!”

“Ma’am, these are real bras. I don’t understand?”

“You know, the kind forged by a blacksmith. An industrial-strength bra. A 44 or 46 GG bra!”

The poor woman audibly gasped. She looked around furtively and said in a whisper, “Come with me.” She took me to a back room.

I felt like I was buying something on the black market – something illegal or at least taboo. There in a dark little cubbyhole were the bras I needed. The store had two in my size, and I bought both. The clerk stashed them into a plain brown bag before allowing me to go back in the store to the cash register. Wouldn’t want anyone to see these giant bras now, would we? I felt like I was transporting heroin or cocaine instead of something as mundane as undergarments.

Several years after this incident, I had another eventful bra-shopping adventure. It was Halloween, and a friend of ours was throwing a huge costume party. Our friends, Mark and Betty Jones, came over to our house, as we had decided to costume shop together. My husband, Johnny, had decided to go as a woman. He’s rather small for a man, and I’m a large lady, so he was going to wear one of my skirts and blouses, but he needed a bra, of course, so we loaded up and headed to our local Walmart.

Mark and I tried several bras on Johnny, much to the dismay of the middle-aged female clerks in the women’s lingerie department. They glared at us with much disdain as they whispered to each other behind their cupped hands. Can you believe that not a single clerk offered to help us?

Johnny couldn’t find a bra that suited him, so he ended up wearing one of mine. We filled the cups with beach towels, I think. We also had to pad his rear because the poor man has no butt. Honestly, he looks like a frog in a pair of pants! We used two small pillows for buttocks. We completed Hubby’s ensemble with a long blond wig and lots of makeup.

We had a blast at the party. As we were dancing, Mark kept grabbing Johnny’s pseudo-butt as a joke. Later in the evening, Johnny removed the ass pillows because they were annoying him, but Mark had no knowledge of the removal. Man, did he get a big surprise then when he grabbed what he thought was a pillow under the flowing black skirt! What a cad! He didn’t even offer to buy Johnny a beer before fondling him.

Actually, this story has a happy ending. I can now order my bras online, without having to embarrass anyone. And I’ve even found minimizer bras that help conceal the size of the twins.