the body (first movement)

I.

Once upon a time, the mother of a man I loved told me that she was surprised her son was attracted to me, given my body type, as she had been taught that men were typically attracted to women with a physicality like their mother’s.

“I have quite large breasts,” she pointed out, “and yours are quite small.”

II.

In my first year of junior high, I played forward on the girls’ soccer team. I was a scrawny, little, flat-chested thing and had recently had my hair cut boyishly short, much to my mother’s chagrin.

(She and the stylist had both tried to talk me out of it and couldn’t. As some sort of compromise, the stylist cut it short, but not at all like the picture I’d brought in, so we were all unhappy with it.)

One day, after school, I was in the girls’ locker room, alone, getting ready to change for practice when two girls I didn’t know walked in. They took one look at me, shrieked, and ran out, yelling, “There’s a boy in the girls’ locker room!”

I don’t remember what happened next.

III.

I generally don’t like to wear nightgowns, as I don’t like the way they move around while I sleep, leaving the bottom half of me feeling exposed. A number of weeks ago, though, having night-sweated through all of my non-nightgown options and still needing to do a load of laundry I’d been putting off, I dug into the bottom of my closet and found the one nightgown I own: a blue paisley, button-down sleep shirt — something I would never have bought for myself and hadn’t.

At first I couldn’t remember why I had it. And then I did.

IV.

“I sometimes worry that I wouldn’t be such a feminist if I had bigger tits.”

Fleabag, Season 2, Episode 4

V.

I can’t remember what we were watching when the argument started, but it spilled over and carried on through the night. It ended several weeks later with consultations at two different plastic surgery practices.

At the first one, the nurse gave me a spa-like robe to put on while I waited for the surgeon to come in and handle my breasts as though they were a kitchen I was finally upgrading (“I was thinking of adding a subzero and maybe one of those faucets over the stove, so I can fill my giant pasta pot without straining my back on the way over from the sink. And if we can swap these granite countertops for quartz…”)

After a brief discussion, he and the nurse left me with a weird stretchy bra and a tub of silicone implants of various sizes to stuff in it and try out. I slipped pair after pair of silicone blobs into the bra and stared at myself in the mirror, putting my shirt on over them and taking it off again, a slightly more sophisticated version of a child stuffing a bra with socks — or a shirt with a pair of birthday balloons — in an attempt to look bustier.

I am certain that at one point during this exercise I aimed my chest at the mirror and pretended to fire my faux breasts at my reflection like an improvised pair of weapons.

“Pew, pew!”

The second surgeon’s office was dark and wood-paneled. No robe, just a hospital gown. He came in and approached my chest quite clinically, listing off all of my deformities and all the extra work it would take to fix them. A few I already knew about, the others I hadn’t, but could have gone without knowing.

VI.

Pectus excavatum is a condition in which a person’s breastbone is sunken into his or her chest. In severe cases, pectus excavatum can look as if the center of the chest has been scooped out, leaving a deep dent.

While the sunken breastbone is often noticeable shortly after birth, the severity of pectus excavatum typically worsens during the adolescent growth spurt.

Also called funnel chest, pectus excavatum is more common in boys than in girls. Severe cases of pectus excavatum can eventually interfere with the function of the heart and lungs. But even mild cases of pectus excavatum can make children feel self-conscious about their appearance. Surgery can correct the deformity.

–Mayo Clinic

VII.

In my adolescent years, my pectus excavatum was the only thing that gave my tiny breasts any cleavage, so I embraced it for what it was (even though I didn’t know what it was — or at least I didn’t know what it was called).

No physician, until wood-panel-surgeon-man, had ever confirmed it by name (though I’d stumbled across that name myself when I was in my 20s), and no physician, including wood-panel-surgeon-man, has ever offered to do any imaging to make sure that the dip in my sternum isn’t compressing anything important.

Maybe if I had been a boy? Perhaps they would have looked into it had I been a boy, bodily ideals of masculinity being what they are. “A woman can have a divot in her chest, especially if it looks cleavage-y in a low cut top. But a man with a depression in his sternum? We can’t have that. He might look weak.“

VIII.

IX.

Because of my pectus excavatum, the center gore of my bras (that little part between the two cups on the front) never sits flat on my chest the way it is supposed to. There is always a gap of 1″ – 1.25″ between where my sternum sinks in and the center gore, depending on the style of bra.

X.

He bought me the blue paisley nightgown because it would open in the front, which would be important in the early days post-surgery when I wouldn’t be able to lift my arms to dress myself.

XI.

Then the Universe intervened.

XII.

Within weeks of setting the surgery appointment, the company he worked for went out of business and within a month of that, we moved to North Carolina, my original small breasts still intact.

XIII.

The Universe (slamming the door):

We’re going to take you to another state and it’ll take a little bit, but you’re going to insist on creating a community for yourself, within which
you will begin to see your true reflection again,
and when you finally leave,
you’ll blossom.
It won’t be easy, but you’ll blossom again
and you’ll be worth it,
because you are enough —
Just as you are.

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XIV.

(You’ll still color your hair, though,
because of internalized ageism,
but we’ll work that one out later.)

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kfw 2021