Breasts

As you've been reading my posts you can see that when I'm in the U.S., I don't have a lot of cute stories about France to tell you. So you'll just have to bear with me until I return there in the spring.

When I was down in Southern California last week, having dinner with my husband's two brothers and their wives, somehow, the discussion turned to breast implants. For those of you who know me well, I am adamant that I was not the one who initially brought the subject up. But we were in Southern California so it isn't odd that the topic would surface at dinnertime.

I made the comment that at the age of forty-six, I had just started liking my breasts. As I said this I felt surprise, contentment and happiness that I had finally reached the point where I could honestly make that comment.

But over the past few days, as I've been thinking about that revelation, I get a little angry as I think about how rough society is on girls and women because for at least three decades, I didn't like my breasts. They were too small. They weren't large and jutting like Barbie's, they weren't huge and glossy like the ones in Playboy spreads, they weren't big enough to catch anyone's attention. Therefore, I wasn't quite a woman.

And, to make matters worse, my last name rhymes with flat and all through junior high, when humans are just becoming cruel, I was called Flat Pratt. I would come home crying because I didn't wear a bra at the age of thirteen.

(Of course, I could have remedied the situation by getting breast implants, but since my mother had a masectomy when I was in college, I had developed this unfounded fear of knives slicing into my breasts. Call me crazy.)

My mother, who had big breasts, told me that men who like big breasts are insecure and have a mother-fetish.

My father tried to be helpful and comforting by pointing out that all the girls who had big breasts in his high school went on to become prostitutes. Admittedly, there weren't too many career choices for women in 1948, but I always doubted his story. Yes, quite a few of the girls who had big breasts in my junior high ended up getting pregnant early in their lives; a fact that just proved my point, that boys preferred big breasts to small ones.

Somewhere along the line, I heard the rumor that French men preferred women whose individual breasts could comfortably fit in a champagne glass. And perhaps, that is where the idea of France, and all the elegance and sophistication it represented, grabbed hold of my consciousness.

Maybe I wasn't really interested in recreating my childhood on a farm. Perhaps I was driven to France because the country has an affinity for small breasted women.

And it all fits -- my new found love of my breasts has come about because I'm spending half of my year living in France, a land plastered with ads adorned with naked, small breasted women.

Yes, I've found Paradise.