Boxers and Boobs
Being single and childless at 37 isn’t exactly what I’d planned. But here I am: divorcee, recently out of a second long-term relationship, and the only thing I have to show for it is a tired pair of boxer shorts which somehow got left behind. They’re grey, coming apart at the seams, and somewhat saggy in places. The painfully accurate metaphor is all too clear.
Actually, I’ve been going grey since I was about 23, and have been sagging in the breast department from an unfairly young age. I read a magazine article as a teenager which advocated the ‘pencil test’ as the definitive gauge for pertness-perfection. Apparently if you are unable to hold a pencil under your boob you are a mammary marvel. If, however, you place a pencil underneath your bust and it is held there, you are doomed to a life of underwire and elasticated scaffolding in order to fool the world into believing you might actually look sexy naked.
Four. I was yet to enter my twenties, and I could quite securely hold four pencils under each of my boobs. I was a lost cause from the start. Twenty years on and my sister suggests I could save money on expensive lingerie by just tucking them into the pockets of my jeans. One of my closest male friends is 41 – the age of the men I feel I should be dating – and he has just started a relationship with a 22 year old. How on earth are my gravity-worshipping gazingas supposed to compete with that? The magazine had confirmed that I didn’t even have a 22 year old’s boobs as a 22 year old, so where do I go from here?!
Turns out it doesn’t matter. Turns out that the underwire and elasticated scaffolding are very good at their job. But, more importantly, it turns out that at the ripe old age of 37, I actually don’t care. Whilst I’m still perfectly capable of feeling self-conscious every now and then, I have reached an eerily calm acceptance of who and what I am, which includes what I look like. Even naked. I’m not sure how I got to this point, but I like it. It may have something to do with how well I’ve pickled my brain with gin over the past 20 years. It’s almost certainly something to do with my ageing eyesight. It definitely has something to do with the fact that I stopped paying attention to teenage magazines a long time ago.
My knackered knockers have become incredibly useful. So far I’ve managed to simultaneously store an array of writing implements under one and a packed lunch under the other. I may be greying, I may have saggy bits, but I’m far from falling apart at the seams. The boxers are going in the bin, and I’m off to buy a new bra.