Start at the beginning

I want to explain why I'm running for the state legislature, but that's the end of the story. How I got there isn't a straight shot, in fact it is quite an elliptical path.

Have you ever tried to explain something that seems so simple to your brain, but no matter where you start telling you find you have to jump back to something earlier in order for your story to make sense? For now, at least. I have to start by telling you why I'm fascinated by bras, so you can see it's just isn't as simple as you might wish. That's why I have to start with Ms Lubbers, my second grade art teacher.

Actually, Ms Lubbers was my art teacher from first grade all the way up to sixth. Not only did we get out of Mrs Halpurn's second grade class - she was boring! - but Mrs Lubbers made art downright fun. It was in second grade she taught us how to draw all kinds of shapes. Circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, rhombuses, even trapezoids. I really liked that word - trapezoid, but best of all were ovals.

Drawing ovals? Big deal you might say, but for me it was a big deal. There was something innately satisfying about the smooth curve of an oval. I doodled ovals, made chains of ovals, they took over my life for a while. It was just a short step from there to an ellipse, which is just a part of an oval. You can doodle some very interesting shapes with ovals and ellipses. Naturally, life moved on and I developed other fascinations, but I still was rather partial to ovals.

My shrink tells me I may as well admit it - I was obsessed with ovals. Obsessed with oblongs? Anyone reading this will be familiar with the concept of obsession - albeit for women's clothes clothes or feminine behavior - but I was too young to realize that I was obsessed.

Next, we have to move - I just can't help saying it - by an elliptical path to the next incident. I was about ten years old, and playing in the backyard with my neighbor Jasper. It was late on a summer's afternoon, warm and sunny as we played on the swing-set. Jasper wound himself up in the swing and started spinning around as the chains unwound. I really don't know what possessed me to start walking toward him as he spun around, but I did and his feet met my nose with a very solid whack! I ended up on the ground dripping blood in all directions while Jasper was vainly trying to extricate himself from the embrace of the swing. I was hurting and staring at the blood -my blood! - and realizing it really hurt. Abandoning any pretense of being a big boy I made a beeline for my mother.

At this point I find I have to make another side excursion in order to have the next part of the story make sense. My father had abandoned us when I was in kindergarten, leaving just me and my mother. I was finally old enough to understand what had happened by the time I was ten, even if it was a pretty simple understanding. In any case, it had been just me and Mom for quite a few years. No, I didn't grow up being treated like a girl, I didn't have bullies calling me sissy or anything like that. I'd like to think I was just a pretty normal ten year old kid - not a ten year old boy or ten-year-old girl, just a typical kid.

OK, back to the story. I was hurting and dripping blood and didn't care about the normal rules of privacy. I burst through the door to Mom's bedroom wailing like a banshee only to find her sitting at her makeup table in only her bra and panties as she got ready to go out to dinner with some of her friends. I'm sure that was not the first time I had seen her in her underthings, but that was when I was a very little kid and I didn't remember. She turned to me and I ran to her and whimpered my tale of woe and pain into her breasts.

Overblown prose, eh? My ten year old self didn't think so. So I was cosseted and led to her bathroom where I was cleaned up and calmed down. When I could breathe slowly and open my eyes, I saw my mother's back in the mirror. To my surprise, her bra described a perfect ellipse. I was stunned. Mom got to wear an ellipse every day when she got dressed. How cool was that? My suffering transmuted to jealousy, but before I could say anything I was escorted from her bedroom so she could remove her blood and snot soaked bra and get ready for the evening.

So now you know where my obsession with bras started Don't worry - it only gets better as time goes on.

I almost blew it. All kids are actors, right? I milked my injuries for all they were worth, to the point that Mom almost canceled her date and stayed home. I know, I know! I was only ten years old - in these days of helicopter parents and absolute, bubble-wrapped protection to keep our vulnerable children innocent and unspoiled leaving a ten year old home alone would cause institutional horror and investigations by a veritable alphabet soup of agencies.

Without actually admitting my current age, let us just say that I grew up in a place and time where kids rode bikes without helmets and swam in isolated pools of water without lifeguards and nobody gave a damn. Thus, once I had realized that Mom wore a garment that actually incorporated an ellipse I just had to investigate.

Now I had gotten the Birds and Bees lecture (in terms suitable to my age, of course) and naturally some of the more "advanced" guys had told some improbable stories about what could be done with girls, but at that point in my life it didn't really penetrate. I knew bras were something girls wore. However, I really hadn't started to notice girls as the opposite sex, but just as one variety of friend. Thinking about it, I realized that there were a few girls who had noticeable breasts even at ten years old, those were the ones the so-called advanced guys talked about. Actually, it seemed a bit creepy to me.

Be that as it may, once Mom was gone I went into the laundry room to further my education. There was Mom's bra hanging on a hook drying out after she had tried to remove the bloodstains. It was hanging by one strap and you couldn't see that inviting oval shape that way. Touching it, it was cold and soggy - not appealing at all. What a disappointment!

But wait! If I had a whole bunch of underwear so I had a fresh pair every day, then wouldn't Mom have a bunch of bras so she didn't have to wear the same one over and over without washing? Of course she did - she was wearing a bra when she went out, so that meant there were at least two of them. In fact, now that I was thinking about it, there were several of them hanging up to dry every washday. But did I dare…

I didn't dare. It just seemed rude to paw through Mom's clothes no matter how interesting they might be. With a sigh I turned around and noticed the laundry hamper was pretty full. It was Friday and Saturday was washday. Could I find a bra in there? I crept up on the basket and was just reaching in when the phone rang!

It scared the crap out of me. I wasn't doing anything really wrong, but it wasn't something I was going to boast about either. I ran to the kitchen and answered the phone. It was Mom, checking up to be sure I was OK.

I told her my nose was a little stuffy but otherwise I felt fine. She told me the stuff parents tell their kids, like be good and go to bed at the right time and all that icky stuff. I told her I would and she hung up. I wonder what she would have said if I told her I wanted to look at her bra. NOT!

It seems silly now, but to my childish brain it was just like Mom was reading my mind, spying on me when I was about to do something that wasn't exactly forbidden, but something I knew was not quite right. So I turned off the lights in the laundry room and found something else to amuse myself until she got home.

When I woke up the next day I had forgotten about my guilty conscience. I went over to Jasper's house and told him I was perfectly fine after meeting his foot with my nose, and no I wasn't mad. We got on our bikes and went off to terrorize the nearby park, then came home for lunch. His mom had turkey sandwiches for us. His Mom and my Mom had some sort of deal to keep an eye on us over the summer so I spent a lot of time at Jasper's place.

I had just opened my mouth to take a bite when I noticed that I could see Jasper's Mom's bra through the back of her blouse. Her bra had that same ellipse that my mother's did. Up until that very moment I had never cared that you could see a bra through the thin fabric of a pale blue blouse, but the sight brought back all yesterday's turmoil.

Not only that, but I was old enough to realize checking out your buddy's Mom's bra was pretty weird. The only time I had ever thought about bras when when those self-declared sex experts at school had commented on someone's breasts. Not that they called them breasts, it was always something like boobs or tits or honkers.

Fortunately, neither she or Jasper knew what was going through my mind. I finished my sandwich and Jasper and I fled the house to see what kind of trouble we could get into. We ran into some of the other guys and I managed to completely forget about ovals and ellipses and bras for the rest of the afternoon.

An elephant (or an obsessed kid) never forgets

Remember I said Saturday was laundry day? After lunch on Saturday Mom started on the laundry, since she was busy with other things during the morning. I had barely finished putting my dishes in the sink when Mom told me to be sure I had all my laundry down in the laundry room or it wouldn't be washed until next week. I'm usually pretty good about getting my stuff into the laundry basket, but last night I was a bit distracted so I knew my clothes were still in my room. So I went upstairs and collected everything I could find (so OK, there was more than just yesterday's clothes) and brought them down. Just as I got there Mom was unhooking her blood-stained bra from the hanging rack.

"You sure managed to make a mess of my bra, kid. I hope I can get the stains out."

"Sorry, Mom I didn't mean to."

"I know you didn't honey. It's just the darn things are pretty expensive."

"They are?"

"Not something you'll have to worry about, but a good bra can thirty dollars or more."

"They can? What makes a bra so good that it costs that much?"

Thirty dollars? Why my trousers cost less than that and had a whole lot more material.

Mom started to laugh. "I never expected to talk about bras with my son - that's something mothers usually have to explain to their daughters."

"Well, you're kinda like mom and dad to me, so why can't I be son and daughter to you?"

"That's one of the most skewed pieces of logic I've ever run across."

"What's skewed mean?"

"Twisted, off center, maybe complicated."

"Like when you complained your bra strap is twisted?"

"You really noticed that?"

"You did a funny dance when you were complaining. Is that how you untwist it?"

A while back I said I hadn't really thought about bras before in my young life. Dredging this memory out of the swamp between my ears may have put the lie to that. Maybe I was interested in bras even then, but didn't want to admit it to myself.

"I can't believe I'm discussing this. If you really need to know, you usually stick your finger under the strap and slide it back until it untwists." She illustrated it by actually doing it.

"Sometimes the darn thing just won't untwist and that's when you do a dance trying to get your finger back far enough to make it straighten out. It's a lot easier if you're wearing a blouse with a wide neck."

"Cool, I must be the only boy on our block that knows how to untwist a bra strap."

"It's a lesson you may appreciate when you get older."

"Huh?"

"At some point you're going to get interested in girls. When you do, most boys get interested in how to remove a bra."

"I guess…"

"Enough of that - let's get this laundry sorted and in the wash. Since you have this sudden interest in bras, you can take the pre-wash and spray the bloodstains you put on my bra before we put it in the wash."

"Awww mom!"

"What? Too macho to handle a bra? I thought you were going to be both my son and my daughter."

"Does that mean I have to wear a bra?"

"With straps as twisted as your mind. Do it while I finish sorting."

So I did. Good grief! Mom actually asked me to handle her bra. It felt weird, stretchy in the back and and smooth on the front. You couldn't really lay the thing flat to spray it with the pre-wash because the cups were poking up. It kind of brought home that girls had breasts and boys didn't, in a whole new way.

That conversation may have been the start of it all - the idea of being both a son and a daughter. If I were a daughter then I would have a bra, right? That way I wouldn't have to look in a laundry basket to see one.

Nah! Crazy idea.

About an hour later the washer buzzed and Mom looked at me.

"So is my new half-daughter interested in learning how to do laundry?"

"Do I get an increase in my allowance?"

"Nice try, kid. You get clean clothes and learn new life skills. Someday you're going to have to do your own wash, so you ought to know how."

"You mean you won't stop by my house to do my laundry when I'm grown up?"

"You usually have a wife for that. While you're in college most boys just run around stinky and wear dirty clothes."

"Yuk!"

"Then you better learn how do do laundry. Follow me to your first lesson."

So I followed.

"The first load we did was the whites. We separate whites from the colors because sometimes the dyes in colored clothes leak out and you don't want pink or purple or dirty gray sheets and unmentionables."

"Unmentionables?"

"Some big, strong men have a hard time saying words like brassiere, panty or camisole; afraid they might have verbal cooties or something. So overly polite people started calling them unmentionables since they didn't want to mention them."

"That's silly!"

"Granted, but people get pretty silly about anything that borders on talking about sex. Since only women wear bras some people think it's too close to talking about sex."

"Like the Birds and Bees stuff?"

"Yup. Your father and I had sex and nine months later you came along. Someday you'll have sex with a woman you love and I'll end up with a grandchild."

"I don't know if I want to get involved with this sex stuff…"

"You're still too young. In a few years you'll change your mind and we can talk about it in more detail. This is not getting the laundry done, you know."

"OK, so what do we do?"

"In this load, everything but my bras goes in the dryer. You don't dry bras because the heat will weaken the elastic and they won't fit properly any more. I'll hang the bras and you put the rest in the dryer. Then we can load the washer with the colors."

So I did, but I was kind of disappointed I didn't get to hang up her bras. By the way, we did get the blood out of the bra. Apropos of nothing, wouldn't Blood On The Bra be a great title for an adult Western film?