TALK TRAVEL
Foreign Bras

Story by Roberta Beach Jacobson

There's no book instructing what a woman should do when a parent dies some 2,500 miles away. It was my job to travel across the pond to the land of my birth to clean out my mom's belongings after she died.

Part of the grieving process included the bittersweet task of going through her personal items. It's something that can be delayed for a short time, but cannot be ignored - whether we feel ready or not. This was one journey in my life where I was completely alone. Being an only child, I had no siblings with whom to share the duty. I had exactly 12 days in the house to get it all done. Then the family home in Illinois would be sold, the keys turned over to complete strangers who would know or care nothing about our family's celebrations by the fireplace or our Christmas dinners in the dining room. So, I realized before I left that I needed to pack a lifetime of memories into just a dozen days.

I was surprised to come across two dresser drawers full of nothing but bras. What confronted me could have filled a brassiere museum.

Why did my mother own so many bras? Some appeared to be practically antiques, my family heirlooms, representing every shade of almost-white, off-white and could-have-once-been-white - something laundry soap advertisers would love to have challenge in a television commercial.

These bras spanned about four decades, which was half my mother's life. Brassieres have gone through the evolution of concealing a woman's mammary glands completely to delightfully accenting them, lifting them as dangerously high as possible - with little or no concern for comfort.

Basically, women get shaped into whatever society dictates at that moment in time. Thanks to the wonder of the brassiere, breasts have probably gone through more styling changes than any other part of the female anatomy, the objective of which completely escapes me.

Maybe I scooted the grieving a few paces faster by trying on Mom's assortment of bras. What I was saying was, "l accept you are gone, but you are not forgotten." Our generation gap was clear. Where I could term bras as optional wearing apparel, my mother's generation celebrated a sense of freedom once they stopped wearing bras to bed under their pajamas. The idea of not wearing a bra during daylight hours would have never occurred to her. It was part of the female experience, a given. I distinctly remember her dressed in a fine tweed dress, down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor. In fact, she only dared to buy her first slacks in the early 1970s. (Of course, she wore pantyhose underneath, because that's just how a lady dressed, she explained to me.)

After days of cleaning and sorting, selling some furniture and filling box after box to go to charitable organizations, I locked up my childhood home for the last time. The taxi was waiting. The driver loaded my unmatched suitcases (bras inside folded neatly--cup over cup, as Mom had patiently taught me to do with my training bras when I was 11, and then I headed to the airport.

I'd like to tell you that when I landed, custom inspectors opened my suitcases and gasped at all the foreign bras, but that's not how this story ends. Customs, for once in my traveling life, just waved me through. I even got half a smile.

Maybe they knew.