My Boobs Are Full of Surprises

The other day, as I was getting ready for bed, I found a red M&M in my bra. My three-year-old had been throwing some up in the air trying to catch them in his mouth and I guess his aim was worse than we thought.

It had, as the 80s commercials promised, not melted. It had, however, left a little red stain on my skin. I looked at it, confused for a moment how it had gotten there, shrugged my shoulders, and ate it. After all, chocolate is chocolate no matter how long it has spent in my cleavage.

Since becoming a parent, I have been surprised by finding a number of unusual items tucked away in various places on my body.

I’m not sure whether my boobs have gotten larger or my clothes have gotten baggier, but my bra appears to have become some sort of black hole, sucking in objects that drift too close to its enormous mass.

I once spent an entire day at a child’s birthday party with a Matchbox car in the left cup of my bra, under my boob, and I didn’t even know it. I haven’t seen the underside of my bra without a mirror since I stopped wearing training bras, but I’m fairly sure that the outside world would have noticed the faint outline of a 2002 Volkswagen Golf protruding from my breast. Even my boobs can’t afford luxury cars.

The worst part of the Matchbox car in the bra incident was that it wasn’t even my son’s car. He had been driving his friends cars along my arms and chest while I desperately tried to ignore him and hold an adult conversation with another mother at the party. I’m not sure whether he did it to get my attention or whether the car just fell into the abyss in my shirt, but it was then lost for the rest of the party. I then had to send an email to the host of the party admitting that my son had smuggled toys across the border on my person. I felt like a drug mule.

In the last three years I’ve found the tips of crayons, caps of markers, cheerios, and one very fine morning I even found a quarter plastered to the inside of my boob. My bra seems to have replaced the sofa cushions as the catch-all for junk nobody wants in our house. So far, that quarter is the only contribution of value my bra has provided, but I’m still holding out hope that one day I’ll find a twenty lurking in there. I might be in the wrong profession for that, though.

This afternoon, my nine-month-old attempted to cram an entire chicken strip down my shirt to save for later, but unfortunately his efforts lacked subtlety. He looked at me as though to say, “What? I thought that’s where food came from.” I guess he was looking for some variety next time he nursed. I handed it back to him and he promptly fed it to the dogs. What a waste of a perfectly good chicken strip. At least if he had left it in my bra I could have eaten it later.

I’m considering contacting Stephen Hawking regarding my developing theory that my boobs are, in fact, the center of the universe. I’m not really sure how these things work, but I’ll be expecting my Nobel Prize to arrive in the mail shortly thereafter. Black holes don’t exist? Try doing my laundry for a few weeks.

Now that I’ve solved that mystery of the universe, I’ll see what I can do about the missing socks. Hang on, I’ll check my bra…

Mary Widdicks is a 30-year-old mother of two boys, two male dogs, and an ever­ changing number of gender-­indeteriminate fish. Her husband calls her ‘Honey’, the three-year-old calls her ‘Mommy’, the baby calls her ‘Milk’, the dogs call her their Indentured Servant, and she’s pretty sure the fish have no idea who she is at all. She is also the writer of the humorous parenting blog www.outmannedmommy.com. You can also find her on Twitter.