The Natural Mother of the Child by Krys Malcolm Belc

Author:Krys Malcolm Belc
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640094390
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

A new doctor’s intake form has a line for Name and a line for Previous Name. And yet when the nurse steps out into the waiting room looking for me she yells:

Krystyn?

I was my grandmother’s first grandchild. My mother was her only daughter. We share many cells, she and I. I can only imagine how happy she was when the doctor grabbed me from between her legs and said

It’s

a

Breasts: A History

My sports bras shred in the dryer, from overuse. I wear them layered over each other until I feel squeezed enough, like a lemon that’s given up most of its juice. I don’t understand what you even do to these things, my mother says, peering through the holes.

Breast: A person’s chest, especially when regarded as the seat of the emotions.

At fifth-grade lunch, boys shout out the number on Sydney’s shirt that appears over her enormous breasts: 1892 for Abercrombie & Fitch, 1969 for Gap. She is the first girl in our class to have boobs. In her book Master Breasts, Francine Prose writes that breasts are a body part that we didn’t start out with . . . whole new organs, two of them, tricky to hide or eradicate, attached for all the world to see . . . twin messengers announcing our lack of control, announcing that Nature has plans for us about which we were not consulted. I read Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret like everyone else, stuffing it in my backpack between chapters so my mom won’t see, won’t ask if I have any questions. I read about the impending doom, dreading them. I feel my chest to make sure they haven’t come yet. I want to stay flat.

I’d be happy to show it to you, but I also have to tell you it doesn’t work, Blume says in a video interview over forty years after she published the book. She pulls back a vest to reveal breasts even smaller than mine. She is demonstrating the famous exercise—I must, I must, I must increase my bust. It looks sort of like the chicken dance. She laughs: a bare, open thing. Not only doesn’t it work, she says, but know what? You find out it doesn’t matter.

Nora Ephron disagrees. In “A Few Words About Breasts,” she writes angrily about her small chest: What can I tell you? If I had had them, I would have been a completely different person.

My second sister Kelsey has huge boobs. Like my mother, my own mother says. You could see hers before the rest of her turned the corner. In Paula Vogel’s 1997 play How I Learned to Drive, the lecherous grandfather makes the same tired joke: She’d better stop being so sensitive. ’Cause five minutes before Li’l Bit turns the corner her tits turn first. Asking why his granddaughter wants to go to college, he says: What does she need a college degree for? She’s got all the credentials she needs on her chest.

My sister Kathleen and I are tiny; my mother calls us unlucky, how she sees herself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.