BOOBS: Fill Your Cup (a post for women, mostly…)
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I am awake early with a cup of tea made exactly the way I like it: double teabags because I am insufficiently patient to wait for one to brew, and almond milk not (only) because I like my tea the way I like my men (intense and nutty), but because of Andrea Arnold’s wonderful film COW (a film that is as much about our world’s women as it is about the humble dairy cow it features, the great bovine beauty whose value briefly peaks after the birth of each calf before diminishing rapidly as the udders run dry, and who is not, sadly, sent out to pasture when her worth has waned… fools. See it. Do take Kleenex but don’t, under any circumstances, take a shake or a latte). And it does not bother me one bit if you don’t like the sound of tea with almond milk: I do and I make it for myself, so there is double joy in this cuppa as well as double teabags.
My cup of Kate’s-choice tea is particularly gratifying this morning because I went tea-less yesterday, and coffee-less and food-less and even water-less after 6 am because it was the day I’ve been waiting for since September 2023, a total of 488 days (and yes, I remembered 2024 was a leap year): BOOB JOB! Well, not quite: completion of my breast reconstruction after a double-mastectomy, a risk-reducing measure due to my BRCA1 gene that thankfully did not involve breast cancer.
When they removed my breasts (which were totes natural and much loved having fed and strengthened my two amazing daughters, but which swung in the breeze not unlike… hmmm… what’s a good reference for the way they hung, all soft and wrinkly and unfettered? Ah, Nicole Kidman’s earlobes…*) they provided me with unfilled, expandable implants, each of which had a port secreted under the armpit for receiving silicon via syringe. When the stitching had healed, my Surgeon made me stand in front of a mirror with my hands on my hips, Wonder Woman-style, while, over the course of a few visits, he did his mammogramattical magic and I went from cup to cup to cup (not of tea…). Do something you love, they say, and you’ll never work a day in your life! So, whistling as he worked, my Surgeon kept filling and filling and filling until I was convinced my breasteses were much bigger than they had been (despite his protestations), certainly much more spherical and much, much more firm (having been hardly of a solid state when the process began, and possibly nearer liquid in some bits, appearing much smaller than their actual volume as a consequence, much like the iceberg that sank the Titanic… And of course the new ones were also much, much closer to my face, referencing Father Ted’s informative lesson in perspective as he places toy cows on a table overlooking a field of real cows, saying to dear, dunce Dougal, “These cows are small, but the ones out there are far away…. Small. Far away.” Genius.)
I am unwaveringly thankful to my Surgeon for everything he did and continues to do for me, but he is, like so many other unfortunates, a man, and as such he thinks women want to look good naked (i.e. look good for them). We do, of course (or did, in my case), but not nearly so much as we want to look good fully clothed (i.e. for ourselves and for each other… and for gay men, obvs). Huge breasts are harder for me to dress and I am all about the farshun and lewks and feeling good when I leave the house, and it has not been an easy 488 days on that front (okay, so I’ve had loadsa surgery and pretty awful depression, so I probably left the house 150 times, but it could and would have been more if my boobs had fit through the front door…). Other women will have had a lifetime’s experience of dressing their beautifully voluptuous forms and they look phenomenal and sexy, but god help the original B-cuppa who becomes a D-cuppa coveting a confidence-boosting Isabel Marant dress or Dior bustier: it is never gonna happen.
Anywho, much like my cup of tea, I realised I needed to figure out how to ask for and get what I wanted boob-wise. Women are not good at asking for what they want, not at all. One of the many frustrations I have about my marriage is that I imagine my husband would describe me as “uncompromising”, and not in a good way, which is far from the case. We are very different people and we both compromised hugely in our marriage, but it is difficult to see or measure the compromise another is making as you do not really understand their starting point. Unless you have PhD level communication skills (and I have been at a remedial level…) and say, “I want X, but I am prepared to do Y in order to edge as close as I am willing to your Z,” then it is not a natural nor easy thing to do. Clearly much better at self-editing then than I am now, I think I used to focus only on the middle, “I am prepared to do Y,” which does sound… uncompromising. But it is not, and you end up with two miserable people, neither getting what they want and neither recognising the compromise of the other.
When you ask for precisely what you want, you risk not getting it, and that can be scary. But when you do not ask for what you want, you guarantee not getting it, which should be more scary, but is in reality a non-conflict zone many women occupy. We think risk-management in our personal lives, as well as our professional lives, is about identifying how bad things could get and mitigating against that worst (or worse) case scenario. e.g. For their summer hols, he wants to go camping and she wants the Four Seasons, so she’ll offer a mediocre three star hotel with poor breakfast options and overly-starched sheets, which’ll still be more than the realistic budget (and he’ll never even know she wanted the Four Seasons… and still does… and why the hell not?). Nobody is gonna be entirely happy in the three star Middle Of the Road Inn, are they? (And this story is in no way intentionally based on any particular summer of mine and it is specifically not based on the summer of 2017 in Lake Como and any similarities to said summer are completely coincidental….)
All of this rambling and largely nonsensical post about tea and cows and milk and breasts and husbands and men and surgeons is simply designed to make a full meal out of the humble cup of morning tea that is: I asked for what I wanted boobz-wise and, by jove, I think I’ve got ‘em. 🥳 They are bandaged up and in immense pain, obvs, with drains collecting bodily fluids at each side of a battered body, but I am at home after another mammoth 6 hours in the operating theatre, looking forward to sorting through the lingerie I refused to throw away (and will likely never be seen by another…) and the clothes I’ve had in storage, and I am deliriously happy to feel a little more myself again. I feel quite emotional about it, which could be the residual fentanyl in my system, or how grateful I am to my Surgeon and the NHS for helping me feel more like a normal woman and less like a cancer patient, or sadness and anger at having to go through these surgeries without the support of the man with whom I spent the entirety of my adult life, or, indeed, happy tears from dreaming about how hot I’m going to be in a bikini in a couple of months.
Really, I think I am weepy because I have FINALLY asked for what I want, for myself and for nobody else, and I think, perhaps, just maybe, I am learning to do that and will do it again. We should all get what we want, ladies, whatever our chosen cuppa. Fill your cup.
*if this means nothing to you, congrats and KEEP IT THAT WAY… or, alternatively, read my review of BABYGIRL
(Photo: Kate’s OG boobs, RIP)
