The Importance of Being Perky

Yesterday, I completed a rite of passage. I bought my first push-up bra.

For girls like me that are well-endowed upstairs, finding a good, quality bra that offers sufficient support is like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Sure, good and supportive bras are out there for us ladies with a larger-than-average rack, but you usually have to be willing to fork out some serious dough to purchase one and the bras themselves are about as attractive as my hairdo after camping in the middle of the hot, humid summer without showering for three days straight. The color selection of the bigger bras is just as bad--the only choices for bras over the size of 38D are white, black, taupe, and flesh. The one time I managed to find a coral-colored bra in MY SIZE, I snapped it up right away even though it wasn't on sale and I had to spend twice as much as I wanted to.

The thought of buying a push-up bra to further hoist up my girls has always been ridiculous to me--after all, if I pushed them up much further, I wouldn't have a neck anymore. Well, as Aaron so helpfully pointed out to me today (as I was complaining about my metabolism), I am getting a little older. Gravity is starting to work its magic and my once perky boobs are saggy...I never thought the day would come. My boobs have packed their bags and decided that they've had it with living up here. They're moving south to retire. Sad. Over the past couple of weeks and after much time spent in the mirror lamenting my breasts' slow journey south, I have been promising myself that my next bra purchase would be an undergarment that would lift the girls back up to where they were about ten years ago, no matter the cost.

Yesterday, one of my friends and I ventured across the street to the mall during our lunch break, and lo and behold, Victoria's Secret was having their semi-annual sale. I have historically been a Victoria's Secret avoider because they don't carry the bra size that I generally wear, and I think that, for the most part, their other stuff is ridiculously overpriced. But, a couple of months ago, this same friend convinced me that I should try a different bra size--one band size smaller but one cup size bigger--because I was finding that my bras were always cinched as tight as they would go but didn't offer any real support up front. So, I tried this new size and...*angels singing*...I can now enter the hallowed aisles of Victoria's Secret in search of a bra for the first time since my freshman year of college.

Anyway, back to yesterday. After some searching through the clearance bra bins at Vicki's, I found a decent looking bra (in black, but it's better than white) in my "new" size and I noticed that it had some extra padding on the underside of the cups...the famous push-up bra. Gasp. Did I dare try it? I looked down at my sad, saggy chest, gathered up my courage, looked at the price tag and noticed that with the sale price I would save 50% on this marvel of modern invention, and marched up to the counter to pay. I purchased my first push-up bra.

The bra sat in the bag at my desk at work all afternoon, and it took just about all of the restraint that I had not to pull it out and run to the bathroom to try it on to see how it looked. When I finally got home after work, I pulled my new treasure out of the bag and showed it to Aaron. He looked at it for a moment, then felt the padding on the cups and asked, "What is this?" Clearly, it was time for the two of them to be properly introduced. I ran upstairs, whipped off my shirt and crappy supportless bra, and tried my new one on. Thankfully, it was all that I thought it would be. When I inspected the state of things in the mirror, I was pleased to see that the girls had been forced back up to their pre-sag location, and, as an extra bonus, the bra is comfortable as hell. Beauty, mate.

So, I spent most of my work day today shirking my duties and thrusting my chest into the cubes of my girl friends, displaying my conversion from saggy to perky. Some of them were like, "Yeah Sara, push-up bras have been around for a while, get over it," while my true friends were, like my new bra, supportive and wonderful. Even Aaron looked at me tonight with a certain gleam in his eye and said, "Wow. They ARE perky."

My eyes are up here, buddy.