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On motherhood and...Boobs


There is a website where you can buy maternity bras, and it is called Hot Milk. Just think about that for a second. Hot Milk.
I don’t even know where to begin.
The following thoughts occur to me:
1. It would hurt if your breasts dispensed hot milk.
2. It would also give a whole new dimension to the idea of the Babyccino. You could start your own sideline as a baby coffee machine.
3. Hot denotes sexy, and linking this to milk suggests that lactating boobs are therefore a sexy proposition. This is pretty niche. I am awed by the female body, including our ability to feed infants, but I’m not sure ‘sexy’ is the word I would use.
4. Is it a riff on Got Milk? Have they jettisoned the question mark in order to make people feel more certain about buying their bras?
5. This website seems to be suggesting that maternity bras themselves can be sexy, rather than the unsupportive boob-squishing pseudo-sports bra design that I have become familiar with.
And it is on point five that I wish to linger, because actually it is pretty important that maternity bras also double up as actual bras – i.e. bras you wear to do an important job, but also help you feel like yourself. I have long maintained that mornings can always be improved by brushing your teeth and putting a bra on. They help you face the day and, if you are ‘working with big equipment’ (as one of the midwives in the hospital said to me), they help your posture and stop you feeling like a blobby mess. Maternity bras, because they lack underwiring, often do not help the woman who must work with big equipment. They rely on elastic and thick straps, but they look dreadful under most clothes, especially t-shirts, which is ironic as they are the uniform of the nursing mother. The ones which are slim enough to look nice offer no support, and the ones that work well look like architectural nightmares. As with normal bras, I want some style with my scaffolding. So much so that it makes me look forward to stopping nursing, which has otherwise generally been a real joy.
Enter (and I am not being paid for this, sadly) my newest purchase – the Freya Pure. This will not be relevant to many of you reading this so I won’t go on, but I would like to note that I bought one last week and it has revolutionised getting dressed. It looks and feels like a bra that happens to have nursing attachments, and it has made my mornings so much brighter. Well done, Freya, and your “seam-free underwired spacer mould”, whatever the heck that is.
Motherhood compromises a lot of aspects of your body and your relationship with it, but every day I feel more and more like a new version of my old self. God bless decent bras for helping with that journey. I will still never make a purchase from Hot Milk. Not for all the milkless tea in China.

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