I was at a party recently and I couldn't wait to go because there would be people from my high school there. It was close to the home I grew up in. It was nostalgic, surreal and a bit exciting because I didn't keep in touch. I never felt like I fit in so it was extra exciting to reconnect some thirty years later. The last time I saw any of these people we were all super young so to find everyone acting like adults, being all accepting and kind, balding and grey, their welcoming faces making the trip down memory lane exciting. It was a thrill also to learn that one member of the group actually had a crush on me. Iv'e already hung out with some of the group a handful of times. It was kind of healing for me. I left highschool a little bitter, relieved it was over and I never looked back and after college I moved to the city while everyone else went way out to the land of cheaper houses. Facebook brought us all back together. Towards the end of the evening we were sitting around talking about old loves and people we secretly held a torch for when one of them piped up to exclaim his love for this one girl, saying he liked her because she had a nice rack. This got a laugh but then he went further and said "Thats why I never looked at you," he pointed at me, "I would have never asked you out because you didn't have any." It brought it all back, highschool all over again. I was never attracted to this guy. That wasn't the point. I laughed it off by saying he hadn't changed since highschool. He was at the moment seeing a friend of mine, who sat next to me, appalled. She was anorexic in highschool and didn't have any mams either. I knew back then why boys passed me over. To me it was a good way to weed out the undeserving. I mean if you really clicked with someone, but she wasn't well endowed, were you really going to choose the girl with the bigger boobs? It brought to mind that neighbor with the playboy magazine mentioned in an earlier post. His wife, who reminded me of the evil Alexis from Dynasty, curvy, gorgeous, and always well dressed, at some point became too old for him. So his love was only skin deep. My mom confided to me that he hit on her once and she gave him a piece of her mind, telling him "you would have never given me a chance based on the size of my breasts.". He admitted she was right. The cruel taunts are like it was yesterday, but I realized it's the boys, not men who needed that. Now my friend is trying to get rid of her middle aged. "boy".
About ten years ago, I developed a crush on a man of German decent the same age as me. I noticed him looking at me at his restaurant and that was it. We were regulars but I didn't speak to him till we were going there for about eight months. He would watch me a lot, and I would watch him back and I started to construct his personality in my mind, noticing how sad he always looked, wondering if he was beaten down by the same kind of cold verbally abusive upbringing many first generation children of German parents face. I wanted to get to know him, this handsome kindred spirit and the moment I did, it ended my crush cold, thank God. It happened one day when my husband and I bellied up to the bar and he spoke to us about going to his highschool reunion, proudly boasting he brought a girl that wasn't even born when he graduated. He immediately went down several notches. Every time after that when we came in, we would sit at the bar and talk to him like old friends. His restaurant was a favorite haunt before we had our son. One night, I don't know what we were talking about, but he said he considered me "too old," for someone like him. Not that I asked, I am married anyway, but it hurt so bad. I went to the bathroom to shed a tear or two in my drunken state. I was already considered a has been with somebody I had been eye flirting with for the past eight months. I was 36 years old. The bubble burst, another boy. He was the same age as me. Later, he married someone ten years younger and with a boob job so incredibly huge, it was painful to look at her. She had to mutilate her body to nab him, a look that would become disgusting in a decade, clown boobs, the size of a cantaloupe stuffed into each side as if it was a Halloween costume, only it wasn't. I couldn't help but wonder what her fate would be when she turned forty. Would he send her in to be pulled tight or just replace her?
It made me bitter, all those messages over the years telling me in some way I wasn't good enough, that even I myself succumbed to the pressure at the age of twenty seven, boosting my cup size just a little, not the giant sizes women were going for, but enough to feel like a woman. I charged them on my credit card, then promptly got a job as a cocktail waitress to pay them off. It was the nineties, women were getting them done in droves. The DJ at the bar I worked noted I was the only one who didn't have to take off work for the surgery...lol! It was fascinating to me how men suddenly stared at my breasts instead of my face. Was that worth it? Suddenly I was hot, very occasionally running into boys from highschool who ignored me but suddenly they knew my name, they were so friendly so willing to be around me, staring not so nonchalantly at my perky Barbie boobs that didn't jiggle or move with me. Oh the power.
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