Bra Shopping: Curses, Foiled Again!

So Dri wanted to go bra shopping at Nordstrom's (where you go if you are done fooling around with all the other lingerie sellers in the world and want to be properly fitted and attended to) and asked if I'd go with her. Sure, I said, because honestly any excuse to spend an evening with your oldest bestest friend is a good one (and really, it's not like bra shopping is usually fun for me…its probably second only to swimsuit shopping as "most likely to make me detest my body" type of experience). So tonight we took the plunge (ha ha) and spent several hours in the Nordstrom's lingerie department being totally disabused of our previous fantasies of correct bra size by a very sweet, stick-thin young saleswoman.

Here's the part where it gets all girly so if you have a problem with that you might want to just move on to the next entry. Ready? Ok.

First, the background: I have always had a difficult time with bra shopping, mostly because I have quite large boobelehs (sorry for the Yiddish but I'm trying to avoid pervert Google searches), especially for a relatively petite person. Way back in the day pre-kids, I was somewhere around a 32 or a 34DD. And that always made bra shopping an unpleasant experience for me, because at least back in those days, there were really not too many bra choices for anything over a D cup, and even when there were, the combination of the relatively small rib cage size (32/34) and the relatively enormous cup size (DD) was especially difficult to find. So with occasional slightly more exciting exceptions, I have spent most of my life in white, beige or maybe black bras, usually of the non-frilly, underwire minimizer type. Of course hindsight is always 20/20, and I look back on those DD days as the "easy" days (not to mention the firmer, perkier days…sigh). Because what am I wearing right now? Well, after having Eli, I went up a both a band size and a cup size to a 36F, and then post-Isaac, I went up again (oh the unfairness of it all! I was really hoping all that nursing and subsequent drooping would at least have made me go *down* a bra size, not *up*) to a 38G, which is what I'm wearing as I'm sitting here typing. Honestly, although it's scary enough to be a G sized cup (I mean sheesh, did you even know they came that big?) the thing that depressed me more was the 38 band size, because what that meant was not just that my cup size had gotten bigger, but that my whole torso was fatter.

But fast forwarding to the present day, lo and behold! Things are different now…kind of. After taking one look at my current bra and my previous pathetic attempt at fitting myself, the Nordy's clerk said to me "you're clearly wearing the wrong size, let me measure you". And when she did, she pronounced me a 32H. Ok, 32: that's good, I feel less fat, yay. But….H??? Holy Goddess of Fertility, that's just….well, HUGE. Yes, I guess that's what H stands for: HUGE. The mind boggles. And even though it was helpful to know the correct size, I was still left with the same dilemma that I used to have back in the day: small band size combined with huge cup size makes it very difficult to find a bra in my size. In fact, this particular Nordstrom's (which apparently has a relatively small lingerie department compared to the stores in the City, to which I will have to hie myself ASAP) didn't have ANY bras in a 32H. Curses, foiled again!

But all is not lost! There are apparently a few new brands of bras out there (including Freya and Fantasie) made specifically for the humongous among us, and they even come in pretty colors and interesting fabrics! So at some point soon I hope to either take a field trip to another Nordstrom's or to hit the internet and get this whole bra situation properly, ah, supported. But at least I know where to start now.