Bras. They are really annoying, expensive, and often uncomfortable.

I have lived over seventy-four years and in most of that time I have not worn a comfortable bra. I didn’t try to wear a bra until I was in my teens, of course, but ever since then I have struggled to find one that didn’t pinch into my ribcage, droop my breasts, or cut into my shoulders.

When I first needed a bra, my mother sent me to the department store a half-hour bus ride away with an older sister so that she could buy a bra for me. I was subjected to the indignity of being assessed, measured, and prescribed a suitable garment, and thereafter encased in the upper-body equivalent of a corset for about three years. It was very big, very white, and very utilitarian.

Since then I have seen miraculous changes in telecommunications, space travel, and medicine, but next to no real breakthrough in women’s underwear. Why is that?

I have seen changes in fabrics, in designs, and supposedly in function, but nothing that promises to be comfortable for a full working day and beyond that into the full working evening. I have headache medicines that last longer than my bras!

Today I was at a yoga class when the instructor, a very fit woman in mid-life, complained that sports bras always roll up. She was right; they do. And she gave all the women present permission to readjust our bras, which we did. The men in the room made no comment.

A decade or two ago, when women switched from underwire bras to bras without wires, we silently agreed to wear bras with wide elastic bands under the cups. They are fine if you are more-or-less sedentary but the minute you move in any exercising manner they roll up and they pinch, and that is a problem. They do, however, make it easier to breathe than do bras with underwires.

Admittedly, I am generously proportioned, and so finding a suitable bra is more challenging for me that it is for women with smaller cup sizes. I acknowledge that. But I am perpetually irritated by advertisements that seduce me with imagined beauty and comfort by images of more petite women. More to the point, I am annoyed at myself for being so easily seduced.

Those of us who choose to stay with underwire bras do so because those are the only ones that look pretty. All the lacy and sexy bras have underwires. They are also the only ones that push the breasts together to create a cleavage. If we want to look and feel attractive in the conventional sense, we have to have lace and cleavage. If we are in yoga bras we have a much longer hill to climb.

I don’t much care about looking seductive any more. Those days are behind me. But I do care about being comfortable and keeping all my bits in place. I don’t want my nipples to show but I do want my attributes to fill out my blouses, and I want those things to happen all day and in comfort.

What I need is for a space engineer, a medical technician, a communications consultant, a fashion designer, and a generously-endowed woman to get together to create bras for big old ladies.

That would probably be expensive, but women of the boomer generation are becoming desperate, and we can afford it! I will be happy to contribute in any way I can; figuratively speaking.