My breasts came in late. I was well into junior high before anything started to take shape, not that I was in any way impatient for them. I had no explanation for what I had on the bottom, but a flat chest made sense to me. I liked it.
When I changed clothes or got out of the shower I always put my underwear and pants on first, before a shirt, an established order of priority in case someone walked in on me. I don’t think being seen naked was troublesome so much as being seen with the parts I had. Were someone to see that, they would think I was a girl. As long as I had no visible breasts, I could still believe otherwise.
I was already tall, having passed up my older sister. I was slender, kept my hair short and often passed as a boy, though I don’t think I knew that’s what I was doing. I only knew that I’d not been called a girl, and that was enough, though grownups had a way of making the correction, which I was led to believe was in order to save me the embarrassment. You see what comes of good intentions.
But what I had, or didn’t have, in my pants was a confusion. I asked my mother once if it was possible, if such strange things could happen, that I was half boy and half girl. I could live with this, I imagined, if the top half was boy. The bottom half was just legs and other stuff that at that age I found little use for. Arms, and hands, and a chest and a brain. If that part was a boy and I had to live with this other part, I thought that might be okay. I didn’t tell her what I was thinking, just asked if it was possible.
She said no, in the way that parents do, mildly amused but not disrespectful. Just gave the answer any parent in the 1970s might do when there was little known language for someone with a body and a mind, mismatched like mine, when she had no reason to think of such a thing. Of course not, she said, just give it time, they’ll come. Not that I wanted them to.
I didn’t ever ask again. The breasts came. They weren’t large. I lived with them. What else was I going to do?
They’re larger now. Not unmanageable with a chest binder, but they retained some of the expansion that comes of breastfeeding two babies. I still dress pants first. They’d be a dead giveaway if someone walked in after I got out of the shower. They look like they belong on a woman. But all the same, they don’t strike me as a woman’s breasts. They just look like they’re mine.