Cleavage Anonymous

I've been sitting here all day dealing with a carnivorous bra, and it reminded me of an essay I wrote a while back. Here for your reading pleasure (at least I hope it's pleasurable) is the first half of:

In Pursuit of Understanding

Do any of us truly understand our children? The day my ten year old son, Jason, told me he was handling his puberty very well I nearly drove into the ditch. Little did I know this was merely a preview of things to come with this precocious youngster.

I didn't grow up around boys. There was just my sister, who longed desperately to be an only child, and me. Boys were icky, dirty little people that ate snails and teased girls. Besides that, they had cooties. Blessed with a healthy baby boy at thirty-five, I had no idea what I was in for.

As I mentioned, Jason was precocious. One Saturday, he and his friends were talking about the chicks they'd seen while cruising the mall the day before and I innocently asked what was so great about them. Six baby faced young men came up with six different versions of cleavage with some very inappropriate gestures, and a rabid gleam in their eyes.

I wouldn't have thought anymore about it except a couple of days later, his little sister Brittany asked if I thought she'd need a bra by the end of fourth grade. So I got to wondering what the big deal was. I never had cleavage until Jason was born and then God got even. Frankly, I thought it was highly overrated. Nevertheless I set out to do a little research to understand the fascination on behalf of both my children.

The logical place to start was the internet, and in my ignorance I typed in the simple word "cleavage". What popped up on my screen wasn't fit to be viewed in a dark room all by myself. My face burned like a radioactive torch. Furtively, I checked over my shoulder to see if any of the kids had wandered in. I was feeling like a wanted criminal. Do real people look at that stuff? If the neighborhood mothers knew, I was sure to be arrested for child pornography. Quickly, I abandoned that line of research.

What better place to look next than to a little girl's favorite toy? Dolls, no matter how crude, have been around practically since the dawn of human history. So I got out Brittany's favorite Barbie dolls to see what made them so popular. Compared to the androgynous Raggedy Ann, Betsy Wetsy, Miss Revlon and Betsy McCall that I grew up with, Barbie is an Amazon of totally unrealistic proportions. Why don't they just give her a leotard with one breast bared, a spear and a shield? If she could yodel like Tarzan, so much the better. No human being is built like that. She doesn't walk or talk. About the only thing you can do with a Barbie is pose her in her many outfits with her cars, pools, ponies, motorcycles and on and on.

Tune in Monday for the conclusion.