FOR ALL TOO LONG I did not know that Saudi women had to buy their bras from men. And while those days are now nearly in the past, don’t for a second be fooled into thinking that this change came easily. Protests, boycotts, an online campaign, and finally, intervention from the king decreed that women in Saudi Arabia no longer have to talk cup size solely to men. Well, better late than never, I guess.

As it stands, the majority of workplaces in Saudi Arabia are staffed by men. In fact, women make up less than 15 percent of Saudi nationals in the workforce, as dictated by the country’s employment regulations. Deeply conservative, the country continues to prevent equal employment, shutting out of the workplace 10 million Saudi women.

The best piece I can find on this is here, and comes from Ellen Knickmeyer, writing from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, who reminds us that exceptions to the equality ban include only the fields of “female education and health care, and segregated women-only malls and “ladies’ levels,” where women can shop alone among other women, at a price premium.”

Keep in mind that even though women in Saudi Arabia can now speak to another female clerk abut the bulge and spill of the bra, they have to be driven by  man to the mall to do so.

And why would that be, you might ask? Simple. Saudi women are not yet allowed to drive.

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I’M IN FOR some necessary change. And you know what? Good for me. I’ve been feeling a little stuffed up recently, and not just in my nose with the ongoing winter in the northeast, but in my life. And necessary change is just what is called for, or so says Sheilaa, our TSP astrologer, whose predictions are always spot on. Have you read what she has to say about you?

I’m an Aries. No surprise, with my red hair and fiery nature. Did you know I write about red hair here? And that fiery nature? Well, I’m a memoirist, and maybe this piece is the very best place to read up on just how hot it can get around here and whose job it is to cool me down.

Sheilaa tells me that my wildest dreams will come true, but only if I do the work. Such a  great challenge. Speaking only of my professional life and my wildest dreams, as well as my efforts to achieve those dreams, all this will be given a real outing this year as my book on writing memoir comes out this June, published by Grand Central. And between now and then (and for a good long time after that) you can find me and that book on Twitter (mroachsmith@twitter.com), on Facebook (The Memoir Project), teaching at The Chautauqua Institute as well as at The Arts Center of the Capital Region, and launching a new how-to-write memoir website.

Follow along by watching this space, sisters.

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THE BRA’S BIRTHDAY. Now there is something to celebrate, sisters. And a centennial birthday, at that. Imagine: 100 years have gone by since the first American woman said—now repeat after me, sisters—“How in the world am I going to these into that?” Oh, yes, sisters, let’s light some birthday candles and throw a few bras on the pyre, since it’s a birthday you don’t want to miss.

The first American patent for a bra went to Mary Phelps Jacob, a rich young woman who grew up in Manhattan, Connecticut and Westchester. Her father rode to the hounds. And merely thinking about her doing that in a whalebone corset is all I need to know to understand how the phrase about necessity being the mother of invention came to be.

It seems that Mary grew up to be full-figured, and that it was not such sandlot sporting events such as staying in the saddle that provided her the needed inspiration. No, it was the big-league sport of mating, as acted out in dressing for yet another ball that did it. And so, 100 years ago, when she was 19 years of age, Mary took things into her own hands, and with two silk handkerchiefs and some pink ribbon, lifted, separated, and forever changed the balance of things. And with that she earns herself a place in our TSP sister history division, called Sisterpedia, of course.

Her patent, officially received in 1914, was for the undergarment known as the “Brassiere,” taken from an old French word for “upper arm.”

Mary, we salute you. And when we salute you, we hope like hell that we are wearing one of our few bras that does not rise up when we do. Because when that happens, well, we tend to rant.

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OUR BRAS. IN TRANSLATION. Is it just us, or do they look bigger in French?

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This post is part of TSP’s network-wide “Sisters I’ve Met Along the Way” celebration, marking 9 months of blogging together, and the women (and men) we’ve met.

I NEVER THOUGHT when I first wrote about bra-shopping months ago that it would prove the start of such a supportive (sorry!) new sisterhood. This song is my attempt to start to thank some of those I’ve met as a result.

To be sung to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas. Oh, yeah.

‘Thanks to the Sisterhood of the Bra’

If ever I should lose my way
You’d be the first to write,
Reminding me that possibly
It’s just my bra’s too tight.

As April did, you’d tell me that
You’re proud I raise my voice,
And Marti’s post confirms that menopause
Gives us no choice.

Deb Wilson’s joyous nod to my good marriage
Did the trick,
Especially when the sentiment
Was seconded by Nick.

“Bra Lady” came from roadchick
On a day I was quite blue,
Reminding me that humor’s nearly as good
As new red shoes.

Renovation Therapy is shouting out with us,
And Donna Miller
Likens all her bad bras
To a truss.

But Missy then reminded me
That there really is an art,
In betting on the nags
Whose names are based on body parts.

And brothers, oh we’ve heard from you,
There’s Kevin, Steve and Keith,
Laughing right along with us
Providing some relief.

Though nothing can quite quell
The hell Priscilla does endure
When taking Mom bra shopping,
It sure sounds like Dante’s tour.

Though Georgie, she has done it, too
And somehow she’s survived,
The fitting room with Momma
And coming out alive.

You’ve piled on the friendship
While you pile on the grins,
Too many names to mention all
So many tales to spin.

So keep those comments coming
Sisters, every word is dear
Who knew we’d find a sisterhood
Stitched into our brassieres?

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MENOPAUSE MADE ME DO IT.  It’s my new favorite shield phrase, though I do find that from behind its protection come some of the more surprising things I’ve said in my lifetime. These phrases just seem to hurtle from me, and while I must admit that they feel so good as they tumble out, even I am sometimes surprised when I hear them go whizzing by. Consider, for instance, what I recently screamed out my car window about my boobs.

There we were, having a perfectly lovely drive in the country. Just my husband and me, zipping along, talking, a rare time alone. No one was over-caffeinated, everyone was sober. In fact, I remember quite clearly that it was a rather lazy afternoon all around. Relaxed, and with no deadlines, we were simply going to our favorite bicycle store to see what was new.

I mean I’d like to blame it on the caffeine—but I can’t—and I don’t drink, so it’s not that influence that propelled me to say what I did when yet another car zipped by with one of those oval stickers on the bumper portraying merely a number.

Have you wondered what they mean? I have. Those little oval stickers used to mean only that someone had touristed in some European city, perhaps even purchased there the vehicle they are now driving and proudly want to display that. Then those little oval stick-ons started to mean more (or less) than that, and I got confused.

The sticker on the car next to us read “70.3.” Nothing more.

And as it whizzed into view I gave no time to the fairly sane man whose job in life it has become to put his index finger in the back of the neckline of my shirt and reel me in. Instead, before I asked what the sticker could possibly mean, I merely stuck my head out the window and yelled, “38 Double D!”

You know that feeling? Like you’ve passed a clot, or dodged a bullet, or otherwise just cleared the air of something you’ve long wanted to do? Maybe cats feel this way after the hurling of a hairball. I hope so. I felt good. Real good. Like I had the last time I went on a bra rant. That good.

My husband was silent for a moment; the look on his face the one he gets when he is forced to quickly shove together the evidence before him into some narrative he can live with. He looked at the bumper sticker. He looked at me. And then he began to laugh in that way I have come to value as the ultimate paycheck of my life. If marriage is the hardest room to work in Vegas—and it is—at that moment all the slots were pouring out in my bucket as he laughed and laughed and laughed.

When he was finally able again to speak, he asked calmly, “You don’t know what those are, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Triathalons. Iron Man competitions. Those are the distances the people have gone.”

“Huh.”

Now I know.

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WOULDA COULDA SHOULDA. Oh, how we wish we were there. But the next best thing to being there is when somebody tells it as you have, about your bras. Oh, sisters we just love you for it. And the hits just keep on coming.

Newly anointed TSP-sister Roadchick sent us this, after reading a TSP post on bras. We’re still laughing.

“Oh, if you could’ve heard the conversation in my office after I read this post! Hilarious.

I was fully developed at the tender age of 13 and of course I was mortified by the changes that seemed to happen overnight. My mom decided that in order to corral my new assets, we would visit The Bra Lady.

The Bra Lady was ensconced in a high rise office building somewhere in downtown Chicago. When we got there, it was no over-the-clothes measuring in the middle of ‘Intimates’, it was topless in a cramped fitting room with my mother and the scary Bra Lady.

I was measured sixteen ways to Sunday and the size (32DD) pronounced and The Bra Lady marched off to find the proper ‘garment’ after instructing me to stay “just like I was”. So I stood there, naked from the waist up, with my mom for what seemed like an eternity.

I would have stayed naked forever if it meant The Bra Lady would not have come back with a ‘nude’ bra with about 16 hooks on the back of it. I was way ahead of Madonna because no longer was I gently rounded – I had the Atomic Warheads of Doom.

It was pronounced perfect, my mom (curse her) requested five more just like it, and after writing a check that would’ve bailed out AIG, we were done.

I probably still need therapy from the humiliation of having to change for gym and everyone seeing my bra from 1948. The bra that won WWII and came home victorious.

Ugh.”

Want to rant about bras? Who doesn’t? You can. Here. And here. And, of course, you could read your own tale of woe-is-my-bra here on TSP, if you’ll send it along for consideration, to thesisterproject at gmail dot com.

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Sisterhood can involve a lot of shoveling.

YOU ARE A SISTER WHEN biology determines it, of course, but then there are those myriad jeweled or jagged moments in life when you know you are a sister, whether that sister be biological, adopted or befriended. Like Tinkerbell herself, these moments of recognition come sifting down through the ethos and can stop us or start us, depending on what we are doing. Just the other day I was simply putting away a suitcase, and suddenly it was 1974, and I was unpacking an entirely different suitcase in what now seems like an entirely different life.

I promise, the little shirt just somehow found its way into my college freshman room closet, and despite opportunities to return it at Thanksgiving, Christmas and again at spring breaks, I always somehow forgot. Trying to secretly slide the shirt back into Margaret’s closet all those merry Mays ago, I was parting with something I, too, now loved, returning an item of clothing that in some combination got worn nearly every single day of my freshman year. Under a shirt, over a shirt, by itself, it was black, had one of those delicate, hidden, painted zippers in the back. And since it could be worn as an undershirt, on its own, or as a vest, it was what Glamour would then have called a “must-have,”‘ as in I must have this despite the fact that it’s Margaret’s, and taking it constitutes larceny.

We love these you-know-you’re-a-sister-when moments. We’ve collected some of these knowing moments from you, and I send a shout-out here to Ashley in thanks (you’ll find her point of view in that last link), whose recent comment sent me reeling back all those years when she reminded me of my petit theft. Just before Ashley’s comment there is also Jane’s, with her two-sister-memory of a good harmless laugh at a father’s drooping trousers, and Margaret Hale’s, which reminds us what twinned memory can do for a sister, and others, all treasured here at TSP. I had a shudder of one myself recently while shopping for bras (I know, I know; the horror of it all).

What’s yours? We’re waiting to hear how you knew you were a sister when…

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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YOU KNOW YOU’RE A SISTER when you’re trying on a bra, and every bra nightmare you’re ever had comes sling-shotting back at your self-esteem as if loaded and launched from a 44DD, and you start to get just the eensiest bit hostile in the dressing room at the pooches and the pouches, and how you look nothing whatever like a Victoria’s Secret model, and you leave 19 bras in the dressing room, buying none, and go crying to the car and call your sister.

“Shopping for a bra,” may be the single worst phrase in the retail lexicon. Substitute, “purse,” or “shoes,” or even “sex toy,” and few if any of us feel the tiny slivers of icy humiliation that run right up the collective female spine when the word “bra” is tossed into that quote.

It’s not that I haven’t had a good fit or two along the way. There was large, red-haired Orthodox Jewish man at Manhattan’s famous Orchard Corset (where Madonna is said to have gotten her Gaultier pointy-cups), all those years ago, who simply glanced at my fully clothed chest, called out a size I’d never in my life imagined being, and then handed me what turned out to be the single, comfortable, properly-fitting bra of my life. Problem was, it was ugly. Medievally ugly. But comfortable. Such kind comfort sonnets are written about. But fetishically grotesque. So ugly was this bra that no one ever saw me in it, despite the fact that I wore it all the time. Relentlessly kind but hideous, it was the Shrek of bras.

What followed are years of misery, after I refused to go back for more ugly bras (and there was that little tiny issue of calling out my size in the store), and instead again set out on my own into dressing rooms, almost always emerging with exactly the wrong thing and, of course, buying it anyway, and calling my sister to kvetch.

Last week was stacking up to be no different. My arms loaded with bras of all shapes (and the wrong size), I stomped into the Macy’s dressing room, expecting the worst, and got it. But this time, my teenage daughter was in the next dressing room, and despite my previous personal experiences, I knew I had one of those chances to change the course of history. This was confirmed after seeing the slump in my daughter’s mood after her own dressing room try-on. And so we left Macy’s and walked the mall. And while I have no more faith in the Victoria’s Secret Angel than the next woman, something made me stop, think, and calmly stroll into the place, go up to a saleswoman, and say the following thing:

“Please help me.”

My daughter looked stricken. Was her mother really going to talk about breasts with a stranger? Yes, apparently I was.

It took six trips and maybe 25 bras, including a recognition that yes, I was choosing the wrong cup size, wrong band size, as well as the wrong styles, until I hit what could have been the really big snag.

“This fits,” I told her, as I took the bra back to the saleswoman, “but I’m pooching out a little under the arms,” to which the wise woman arched an eyebrow toward the enormous black and white photograph of the near-naked model in a heavenly-hovering mode just above us, and said, “Everybody does a little. Everybody.”

Later, at home, I dialed Margaret and told her the tale: I had new bras for the first time in years; my daughter had learned the lesson that you ask for help even when the subject is your own breasts; and that you do not leave empty-handed, no matter how hard it might seem, to which Margaret said the two loveliest words a sister can say:

“Good job.”

You know you’re a sister when that happens.

We’re collecting sisters’ versions of when we know we’re not out there on our own. What’s yours?

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