Boobs

8

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

In seventh grade I start junior high in Appleton — a mid-sized college town about twenty minutes from home. Dad is a surgeon at Appleton Medical Center and just across town, mom is a practicing marriage and family counselor at her co-founded mental-health collaborative, The Wellness Center. Kaukauna, where I spent my elementary school years with Jenny, is a small, paper mill town and is the closest school district for rural students unless you’re Catholic. I learned a lot of my social graces from those first six years in Kaukauna. Be extra nice to everyone. Don’t flaunt your grades. Never tell classmates that your dad is a doctor. Make sure mom picks you up a block away from school so kid’s don’t see you crawl into her red Audi. Don’t do anything to stand out. Don’t wear anything to stand out. Lie about the locale of family vacations. At birthday gatherings, make sure your gift is nice, but not too nice. Be cautious with inviting peers to the house. One time I got up the guts to invite some new friends to my fourth grade birthday party and found a hand written letter on the bus later that day reading, “Are you going to Kim Warner’s birthday? I’m not. I don’t want to go to that rich bitch’s house.” I don’t remember much about my party but I will never forget that note.

Am I a bitch? Shy, yes. But I study my “finishing school” etiquette with diligence. I prioritize the comfort of my peers over my own. I like school, I do my homework, I love PE and recess, but at school everything is underscored by the impossible task of making sure everyone thinks I’m the sweetest thing since Fun Dip Candy Sticks. Maybe she has money, but she makes up for it in spades because “Boy that Kim, she’s so thoughtful, she’s so sweet.” And what is being thoughtful, sweet, generous, and kind suppose to buy me in my imaginary plot with the universe? A sense of belonging.

I long to belong.

But am I OK with my longing? That’s decades away. The belly ache of yen goes where all the unwanted feelings go — my personal emotional trash compactor. Get small, get quiet, go numb so you don’t have to feel the feeling. Had I allowed those feelings to be present, I might’ve discovered the irony of acceptance. When I can be with my longing, I belong. Maybe not to every social strata within the universe, but I belong to my body, my truth, myself.

So when mom and dad decide to send me to junior high in Appleton, I am relieved to meet classmates who don’t judge me for the money my parents make. It’s like walking onto a new planet. Girls experiment with their clothes, actually trying to stand out. Guys think it’s cool that my dad works at the hospital up the street. The social strata is much more diverse and I sense that there is room for me, whatever that means.

During my first PE class, we are summoned into the girl’s locker room for a routine scoliosis test. A friend in my ballet class wears a plastic torso brace for scoliosis so I am vaguely familiar with the condition. Mrs. Funk asks us to line up along the gym lockers and bend forward while removing our shirts. I don’t know what the other girls are thinking but to me, this feels like an awfully intimate introduction to my new classmates. But I oblige. Bow. Shirt off.

It’s only when I stand upright that my face begins to burn, and not from the blood that pooled in my upside-down skull. I am the only girl in the line without a bra. It hadn’t occurred to me that girls wear bras, even if you’re still built like a boy. It’s just protocol once you’re in junior high? An awful layer of satin or lace under my tee shirt? I cringe at the idea of wearing one and I’m horrified at the idea of not. I don’t remember anyone being particularly mean about my naiveté that day but I also have a really good delete button in my brain for the more traumatic events of life. Needless to say, that night mom takes me to Marshall Fields lingerie department. We buy a white, mesh athletic bra and I wear the very same one for years.

My boobs don’t grow until I’m well into my twenties so my seventh grade initiation into puberty, or lack thereof, carves an obsessive thought pattern into my brain. Later, this synapse will be replaced with a whole list of obsessive and magical thinking worms. But for a good five to six years all I want are boobs. I think that if I do chest exercises I’ll get boobs. If I eat chicken, I’ll get boobs. If I think the right thoughts, I’ll get boobs. Eventually, when I’m eighteen, I ask dad (who had recently read a book about hypnotherapy) if he could hypnotize me and help my boobs grow. Boundaries anyone? I think the appropriate response from a father should have been, “No.” Or “How about I find you a qualified hypnotherapist?” Or even better “Let’s find something more constructive for you to worry about!” But instead, he says “Sure.”

We do the session in the meditation room. Of course. I sit cross legged by the window and he sits across the room assuming his objective but kindly physician’s demeanor. I feel terribly awkward but his clinical approach puts me somewhat at ease. He doesn’t say “boob.” He says “breast tissue.” As if that makes it all ok.

I’ll spare you from the details. It is a pretty uneventful trip down some stairs, counting backwards as I descend. When I reach “one” I am still completely aware of the room, the Saturday afternoon sun blazing across my legs, the hot itch I feel in my chest when something is shoved unconsciously into my emotional trash compactor. Besides wanting our experiment to work, I want dad to feel like he’s doing a good job. I fake my way through it and later retell the experience as a funny (and failed) hypnotherapy session. Padded bra sales at Marshall Fields go up that season.

NEXT CHAPTER

Dad’s office-turned meditation room-turned breast enhancement clinic.