Dear Friend & Reader:
I bought a new bra the other day. Not the kind you would imagine your mother buying, even though for some of you, I am old enough to be your mother and perhaps even your grandmother. This was no white 18-hour wide-strapped built-for-heavy-artillery Playtex special.
This bra came with a set of clear straps and brown satin ones, to match the bra. It can be strapless, or one strap for asymmetrical cut tops, cross-back, halter and regular plain Jane two-strap. It holds up my breasts, both proud D-cups upright and perky. It is a bra ready to go anywhere anytime and any place my fashion sense determines. And I thank the goddess I found it, because it lifts me and my fifty-plus body upward, helping draw attention to my best assets–my chest and my head, providing proportion to my round sensuous hips.
My mother would have been proud.
I have often wondered about and yet am still to fully understandВ my mother’s amazing sexual vitality.В I grewВ up in a family where sexuality was overt, where the women of my mother’s side of the family had no inhibitions rejoicing in it and talking about it in front of us kids. ThisВ has had an effect on me I have yet to fully gauge.
The conversations at the table during my youth between my mom, her sister Rosario and their aunt, Antonia were all-night, smoke-filledВ marathons of filthy jokes and ribald gossip about themselves, their men and the men of our family — only a quarter of which I could get given my limited understanding of Ilocano, spoken on purpose to try to keep me and the other kiddies lost while in earshot.В However,В I was intuitive enough to understand their arcane code disclosed some pretty rowdy history.
My parents closed their bedroom door, so I never saw them in the act of lovemaking. I was aware in my childhood that my parents enjoyed each other sexually, and those touches and expressions of their love while we were growing up, even though I didn’t know exactly where they originated from, provided a wordless safety net of emotional security, even as we were becoming a two-language household. There were three languages in our house: Ilocano, English and physicality.