In Which I Lament Early Blooming

My breasts came in when I was 9. I remember the latter parts of elementary school not as the joyful, carefree days spent doodling in textbooks with my smelly peers, but as a time of overwhelming self-consciousness. It happened overnight: I came down to breakfast in my nightdress, quite unaware of the new addition to my chest, and stopped cold at my brother's wild-eyed, ecstatic face. It was the look wrought only from a gift passed down from on high, a sign that you are being blessed by the hand of God himself: it was the undeniable recognition of your older sister's greatest humiliation. He ran from the room, and, standing in the grey morning light I felt the slightest tenderness coming from something swelling over my breastbone. Ringing out, as though shouted from the highest mountaintop, I heard my brother's now-infamous cry: MOM, Steph's got big ones!

With the misguided logic of a hormonal preteen, I began wearing my brother's left over Beefy T's-- you know, all the radio and sporting event freebies that the chubster himself couldn't fill out. I refused a bra, under the equally as misguided notion that to wear one was toacknowledge them, thereby making them real. So I endured the 4th and 5th grade in shin-length Umbro soccer shorts and enormous white t-shirts that draped in two stiff tents from my budding chest. Shortly thereafter, my brother was blessed further: I had developed a ruddy case of acne and acquired round, wire-rimmed glasses. Did I mention that I was in my 3rd year of braces? And that the braces were an experiment in orthodontia by my elderly and somewhat blundering dentist?

In short, I had it going on.

While my forehead remained a breeding ground for volcanically active whiteheads and I kept the braces, wire-rimmed glasses and, for a short while, a blunt shoulder-length haircut in the shape of a yield sign, it was really only my breasts with whom I waged war. Not until my flat-chested comrades began donning tiny training bras would I even consent to a sports bra (6th grade) and I would often wear 2 and sometimes 3 shirts to buffer their shape. I crossed my arms over them, covered them with my books, hunched my back to counteract how horribly convex they were. And the boobs fought back: they just kept growing. They grew and they grew....

Until..

Just kidding.

I do, however, consider myself the gracious loser of this round of "My Pubescent Stories Are Sadder and More Embarrassing Than Yours." If you're in the mood for a good cry, and you think you can handle the classy kind of journalism over at The Sun, here's the link:

Bed-Bound By My Big Boobs.