It took getting divorced for Jill Waldbieser to remember that her boobs are far from her greatest asset. In this month’s “Life with the Girls,” Jill finds freedom from a culture that tends to worship women one body part at a time.
There’s a photo of me in one of my mom’s old albums that’s all tomboy: shaggy blonde pixie cut, scraped-up knees, missing tooth, no shirt. I remember running around like that a lot on humid summer nights, not a care in the world.
I also remember when my next-door neighbor told my mom I needed to start wearing a bra. I was in fourth grade, and despite a steady diet of Judy Blume paperbacks, had zero enthusiasm for bra shopping. I didn’t really develop until 16, but when I did, it was like my body had decided to make up for lost time. My boobs grew so fast, they left stretch marks in their wake. Seemingly overnight, I had to trade my cute, comfy triangle bralettes for heavy-duty underwire.
Grunge was in fashion, so I buried my chest under baggy T-shirts and let an unbuttoned flannel flap around for added distraction. The last thing I wanted was any visible signs of swelling or cleavage. What I had, in my mind, were twin burdens. They made me less aerodynamic, harder to dress, took a lot of time and money to deal with and, for all that, didn’t confer any special benefits that I’d noticed—most people would never have even guessed I was a D-cup.
That changed when I met my (now-ex) husband. He was a quintessential boob guy: the bigger, the better. He worshipped Pamela Anderson. There was no doubt which of my assets he liked best, and as someone who had never been happy with the size or shape of her breasts, that kind of appreciation was refreshing. It was a silver-ish lining when pregnancy swelled my cup size four letters (I didn’t even know anyone made an H) and trying to find a bikini meant a weekend-long deep-dive. The day my milk came in, as I stared at the mirror in stunned disbelief that they could get even bigger—cartoonishly rounder and perkier, too—he just grinned like he’d won the lottery.