Training Bras

There are several milestones in the life of a girl, but getting a training bra has to be one of the first.

Kathy asked me earlier this summer about getting one. She's 9 and going into fourth grade. I was trying to calculate if that was the usual time for one, and then decided to ask her why she needed one now. Unsurprisingly, the answer was because her best friend had one (the friend is 10).

Oh, the consequences of peer pressure. First, it's the training bra, next, it will be cigarettes, and after that, the first swig of beer. Kathy's whole deflowering, so to speak, flashed before my eyes.

"You don't need something just because Jenny has it," I told Kathy in my best mother-knows-best tone. She kind of shrunk in the seat and didn't say anything else about it, and I felt like I had won the round.

But once my hysteria had wound down, I thought about it more and decided that giving a girl a training bra when she wants it (as opposed to when she needs it) is probably a good idea. So, when we went back-to-school clothes shopping, we picked out a couple of training bras for her. They are actually much nicer than the ones I remembered. Hers look like sports bras and came in pretty colors.

I had flashbacks to my first training bra as we were fitting hers on in the dressing room. The look on her face as the material clamped around her previously free chest buds was quite familiar. I think every girl gets the same, "This isn't really comfortable and not what I was expecting" look on her face as she snaps on the harness.

In my case, I had bugged my mother for a training bra for a couple of months before she finally broke down and bought it. "Once I get you this, you have to wear it," she warned. I should have heeded the warning.

It was all cotton (no elastic straps for me!) with a hook in the back that dug into that place between your shoulderblades and rubbed irritatingly. After 5 minutes of it, I was ready to take it off, but my mother's dire warning was in my head, so I left it on.

We went to dinner that night at Denny's, and I ordered fish fillets. It was my 10th birthday, and Denny's was a big deal for us in 1974. Unfortunately, the waiter dropped my plate of food, and so I sat there, uncomfortable in my new training bra, starving and miserable, while the rest of my family got to eat their dinners long before I did (because, of course, nothing was pre-cooked in those days).

It's a weird memory to have of one's training bra, I'll admit, but the whole not-being-able-to-eat thing seemed to exemplify the misery I felt in the cotton harness. After we got home, I hid the training bra under my bed until I actually had something to put in it.

With Kathy, her excitement for the training bra lasted almost as long as mine had. I've found it all over the house where she's taken it off after having it on for 45 seconds. I figure it's better for her to get used to it a little at a time, as opposed to making her wear it when she doesn't want to. The time when she'll need it will come soon enough.