Dragged by a 6-year old

mostly just b00bs this time

Rowan watches me get dressed often, and sometimes my form strikes an impact and encourages him to give feedback, and other times - most times - he’s too busy asking me for something or talking about Star Wars to comment, like, or subscribe (JK he subscribed for 13 months until a sad (for him) and triumphant (for me) weaning).

I was getting into my tennis clothes the other morning, and just before encasing myself in elastic, he raced towards my chest with his hands outstretched. “Your boobs are beautiful, mommy! They’re so floppy!” he sighed with an aura of romance, his little hands cupped around them.

No, Rowan, I removed his hands from my tits and corrected him. They’re not FLOPPY.

Okay, sorry! They’re DROOPY! he smiled, with a really false sense of encouraging.

NO! I yelled. That’s not the right term to describe them!

Then what?! he asked, truly flummoxed.

BUOYANT, I landed proudly on a vaguely aquatic antonym for his slander.

Okay, they’re BUOYANT. Because they hang down and I can pick them back up! He grinned, pretending to be the Mayor of the B00b Sea, foolishly not taking warning at the red sky in morning (my face).

Of course, I used that moment as an opportunity to teach Rowan that all breasts hang down and can be picked back up, not just mine, and the beauty and differences in all the female forms.

Kidding, I obviously yelled at him to go put shoes on while I walked over to the mirror and stared at my chest. Growing up, my mom always described my breasts as “very French,” which I assumed meant small because in 1989, when she went on a trip to Paris with my dad, their luggage got lost and she had to go buy new clothes. She described the experience of buying a bra in France harrowing.

“This is not a bra,” she mimicked herself in the store, speaking slowly to a doubtlessly haughty French salesperson. “These are contact lenses,” she mimed bringing the cups of a small lacy French bra up to her eye. “These cannot fit breasts. These are for eyes. Yeux. You,” she over-mispronounced in her Cicero accent that really comes out when she is ~feeling herself.

I’m sure they were incredibly charmed by her in the store that day, as I was in my room, having my shrunken postpartum breasts referred to as droopy by the very tiny gentleman who received the lifeblood that provided the nerve to refer to them as such.

We went to our friend’s wedding in Portland last weekend and due to the truly astounding generosity of my longtime friend J, dropped our kids off in Seattle to hang out with her and her husband and 5 year-old for the night while we danced in a lakeside forest with at least 1700 shades of green in Portland.

Legally you don’t even have to have your eyes open in photos.

Anyway I got a text halfway through the night exclaiming that Rowan had lost his tooth but it was while brushing his teeth, so it accidentally got swept down the drain, which of course threw my extremely sensitive guy into an apoplectic fit of despair, believing that the tooth fairy would never come if he didn’t have a tooth to offer, much less come to Seattle.

Tooth despair-y.

We met another couple at the wedding that night who happen to live 10 minutes from us and also have a 5 year-old daughter and 7 year-old son who had lost his 6th tooth that very night (!!???!!!) and we both bemoaned how their current caretakers would not be able to do the same fairy routine as we do because we both give Sacagawea coins - BECAUSE COINS ARE MORE MAGICAL!!!! - we screamed in unison at each other, clutching the sides of our heads at the dopey coincidence of it all.

~

I came home from tennis after the Great Tit Reckoning of 2024 and told Rowan and Zoe a story about the brusque encounter I had with the girl I was playing a match against that day, whose whole ~vibe~ was really off-putting. Zoe looked thoughtful for a moment, and then said:

“She’s rude. She should be turned into a fish. Plankton. So she would just float. And so a whale would eat her.”

My very buoyant chest puffed up even further in the remarkable gratification of a 5 year-old sticking up for you.

“Wow, Zoe, yes. That’s exactly right.”