A woman came in who struck me as very cool. She was rockin’ a brown t-shirt, I would estimate she had about 20 years on me, and she told me she was ready to buy a new bra. We were standing in the middle of the shop and she started telling me that she was still wearing her post-op bra from a few years ago. “I have a whole drawer full of bras, but none of them work.”
She explained that those bras in that drawer had been sitting there for years unused as things had changed since the cancer and the reconstruction. She alluded to something else, but we never got to it exactly what that was.
Once we got into the dressing room and she took off her shirt, I saw that she was wearing a gray wireless bra that buttoned in the front. Front closures are pretty typical post-operative style bras so I wasn’t surprised there, but what did surprise me was that she only had the bottom of the three buttons fastened. I didn’t ask why, but I thought that maybe she was trying to make it look more like a traditional bra by creating a “V” with the two top buttons unbuttoned. It kind of created some cleavage and it looked about as sexy as any post-op bra was going to look.
I took measures and I asked about what kind of bra she was looking for…”no wire, I assume?” She said no, she was totally healed and OK with wire and that she wanted something for everyday. As I left to gather some bras, I asked, “…by every day, do you mean tan?” She said, “No tan…black, pink…no tan. I hate tan.”
After helping her try on a few that fit her criteria, she talked about the cancer and the reconstruction and she again alluded that there was more to the story. Again, we never got to what that was.
I left her alone in the dressing room to try back on the ones she liked and see how they each looked in her shirt. After a few minutes, she poked her head out and said she had it down to two, but really needed my help for the final decision. I saw that her two finalists were both black and one had wire and the other one didn’t. My inclination was to push her towards the wireless one. She was coming back to traditional bras from a few years in a wireless very “friendly” post-surgical bra and I thought a wireless would kind of ease her back in to the traditional bra world.
She tried on one bra with her t-shirt and then the other. Her breasts really looked the same in both bras! This wasn’t helping the decision-making. I suggested the wireless on the basis of the comfy/post-op/wireless bra world she was coming from. We talked a little about that. She still wasn’t convinced.
I tried to remember where else she was coming from and I remembered she told me she had a drawer full of bras that were just sitting there. “OK…, which one would you pull out of your drawer and actually wear?” Her finger immediately pointed to the one with the wire (and a little more low cut) like a person throwing a dart. “THAT one,” she said.
“Well, there you go! Get that one!” I said.
She laughed, nodded, and asked kind of like she was teasing me, “Is this your calling? Do you think helping women with bras is your calling?”
“I do!” I said.
“I don’t mean anything by that…I’m not saying bra fitting isn’t important…”
“No, it’s ok, I don’t take that badly. I do. I do think it’s a calling. I mean, I think we all have gifts we can bring to the world and I think this might be mine. I love it. I’m good at it. I feel like I help people. It brings out the best in me. …That’s a calling right?”
“Yes, I guess it is.”
We nodded in silent agreement.
“I’m taking this one,” she said as she held up the wired and more “sexy” one of the two. We laughed.
Courtney rang her up and I happened to be in between the register and the door as she turned to leave. We walked towards each other and hugged. She thanked me and I thanked her.
“Now, you take that bra out of your drawer and you wear it,” I said.
She nodded. “I will.”
I feel like I’ve made a new friend. I bet she’ll be rockin’ her new black bra the next time I see her. Maybe I’ll get the rest of that story. She told me at least a couple of times that I hadn’t heard the half of it.
What is calling? Open that drawer.
Rock on.
– Joy
