My Mother's Befouled Breasts

When I was in junior high school, I started being bothered by my parents' practice of saving used Kleenexes. I found crumpled tissues everywhere and threw them in the trash. My parents got mad because they thought it was wasting money not to use the tissue up to the last bit of it.

Perhaps because I was starting to develop breasts, I was especially troubled by Mom's habit of blowing her nose on tissues and keeping them for later re-use in her bra. A sickness would sweep over me at the sight of an uneven bulge between or above her breasts, of wadded tissues displayed on her chest like macabre echoes of flowers I had seen in women's cleavages on television, or a tissue sticking out from the top of her dress like a plume.

Why, I wondered, did she want something dirty, something with snot on it, right on her breasts? Although I was too young to see them for myself, I well knew that in magazines like Playboy and Penthouse women's breasts were shown off as something sexually exciting. Everywhere I looked I could see grown-up women, both in real life and in magazines and on television, emphasizing the breasts as something beautiful and alluring. But when I looked at my mother, I saw them being used to keep trash.

One day I came home from school and found Mom in the kitchen. She was wearing a simple sleeveless dress with a yellow background and flower print. A bulge the size of a golf ball was in the middle of its chest area, right above the bustline.

Before I said anything, she angrily asked, "What're ya looking at, Teen?" I used my first name, Tina, when I was growing up.

"That looks disgusting," I said, pointing to her befouled breast area. "Please throw it away, Mom."

"This dress doesn't have any pockets, does it?" she challenged, hands on her hips.

Anxiety shook me, a painful tension on my scalp and the palms of my hands. "Mom, it's dirty," I said desperately. "Please throw it away."

"Kleenexes cost money," she retorted, "and I'm not going to waste it."

"They don't cost much money," I said weakly. "The whole box doesn't cost much."

Ironically, cleanliness as a virtue was strongly emphasized in my household. Mom was a non-drinker and non-smoker who in most respects was both fastidious and tidy. She did not work outside the home but she definitely worked in it. Her days were not spent in a housecoat crashed on the couch in front of the TV. She was neatly dressed every day, conscientiously performing household chores and driving us kids around. Our house was never spotless or "neat as a pin" but cleaner and tidier than some other homes that I visited. Mom had taught me that being clean was extremely important which may partly explain why I was so terribly bothered by what I viewed as dirtiness in her.

Throughout my teen years, my mother and I had regular fights over her befouled breasts. I thought that the breasts are one of the main things that distinguish women from men. They symbolize womanhood. They are supposed to be lovely in their shape and form. How can they be places to keep something that has been dirtied? Is that what it means to be a woman -- being a walking trash can?

"Mom, other women don't put dirty tissues in their bras," I once told her.

"I've seen women do it," she said.

"Who?" I asked.

"My own mother, women in stores," she replied.

One time I was in the upstairs hallway when Mom blew her nose, then stuck the tissue in her bra.

Anxiety and disgust gripped me like they so often did. "Mom, please, don't just stuff it in there," I pled.

"If I want to stuff, I'll stuff!" she declared.

I cringed.

Often I was at the table, trying to eat when I saw a used tissue distorting my mother's chest area or sticking out of her top. A sick feeling would swirl in my belly as I tensed up. "Please, Mom, please throw it away," I would beg anxiously.

Glaring at me with her green eyes full of fury, she would usually pull the dirty tissue out of her bra and violently wave it in my face. Then she would either toss the used Kleenex in the trash or on the floor.

Once when I was sick with a cold, I told Mom it made me even sicker to see her carrying around a used tissue in her chest. "It's filthy!" I croaked.

"I should slap your face," she said angrily.

As a teenager, I often found myself nervously touching my chest through my clothing as if to reassure myself that the area was smooth and not distorted, not dirty.

One time we had just gotten into it about her trash can-chest and I shuddered and said, "And you wonder why I'm not happy here."

"Because I've got Kleenexes in my bust?" she asked.

It sounded silly when she said it that way and I couldn't explain the reasons for it but the sight of her chest with a snot-filled tissue on it filled me with agonizing senses of disgust, anxiety, and rage. The sensations were always there and could hang on long after I departed from her company.

I became afraid to look at Mom. I didn't want her to angrily ask, "What're ya looking at, Teen?" nor did I want to be sickened by the sight of her defiantly befouled breasts nor did I want to have a tissue with snot on it shaken in my face. So when she would speak to me, I would automatically turn my head away to avoid a fight so mother-daughter talks were often made to the back of my head.

Sometimes dirty tissues even invaded my dreams. I don't recall any other details of the dream only that a woman was in front of me and suddenly pulled a crumpled Kleenex out of her breasts and shook it in my face.

My mother decided I was "neurotic about Kleenexes" and enjoyed playing on what she saw as my hang-up. Of about junior high school age, I was in the bathtub and Mom was in the bathroom with me. In her underwear, she sat on the closed toilet seat. She blew her nose on a tissue.

"Mom, please don't put that in your bra," I begged.

"I won't," she said and promptly put it into her panties at the crack of her ass.

A feeling instantly went through me like acid thrown at the back of my head and whipping down my spinal column. "Mother!" I shrieked. "Don't stick it there!"

"I've got to stick it somewhere," she said, apparently enjoying my distress.

Sometimes my Dad got in on the act. The three of us were gathered around the table for dinner and I was staring, my stomach doing flip-flops, at the irregular bulge at the top of my mother's chest.

"What do you think is in there?" Dad asked me, a smile across his face, clearly amused by my discomfort.

I couldn't say anything.

"I bet there's a Kleenex in there," he said, smiling more broadly. "How much you want to bet?" he asked, offering his hand across the table for a shake.

I just looked miserably from him to Mom and down at my food as it grew cold.

On another occasion, Dad seemed to take my side.

I stared at Mom's chest area and complained, "It's disgusting."

"You hear that, Bill," Mom said sarcastically. She mimicked, "'It's disgusting.' You can't even see it but 'it's disgusting.'"

Dad looked exasperated. "Honey, somebody's going to have to give a little," he said to Mom.

She pulled the used tissue out of the top of her bra and flung it on the floor as she said to me, "You make my life hell!"

I could not understand her bitterness. When I begged her to throw away a tissue with snot on it, it was as if I was demanding she give up a pint of blood. How much was the little bit left on the tissue worth anyway? How much money was being saved?

At the same time this was going on, I was also finding used tissues in other places and throwing them away. Mom or Dad would wonder where a soiled tissue had gone and I always experienced an overwhelming sense of awkwardness and irrational guilt. Was I really doing something bad? But those things had snot on them, waste from inside the body, I told myself. People don't save toilet paper for re-use, why should they save other tissues? They were dirty and supposed to be thrown away.

My house was frequently the scene of screaming fights because my parents realized that their soiled tissues were being discarded. "You're wasting money!" Mom would shout. Dad told me, "Tina, when you see a Kleenex around that's not yours, you keep your hand off it!"

Of course, there were other things going on at my house besides saving tissues and fighting over it although that is the focus of this essay. To understand the whole picture, and how my mother's befouled breasts contributed to my disability, I have to say something about my entire upbringing.

Mother has told me I was a good child until age five. I had been easy to care for and friendly. She says, and I well recall, that I began having problems in kindergarten, difficulties cooperating and showing a stubborn streak. Other children disliked me and I became one of those children habitually teased.

Disabling emotional problems commenced when I hit puberty. Mom started to go very heavy on man-hating messages. "Fartin' men!" she said when I told her about a man who cheated on his wife. Other times: "He was a typical, beastly man," "You see what men will do to ya," "You see how they'll do."

At the same time, Mom also hit hard on anti-feminist messages as this was the time when the Women's Liberation movement broke and she strongly opposed it as it seemed to be shouting "Get a job!" when she had her hands full as a housewife. Mom was eager to tell me about how a woman had failed at a non-traditional job or endeavor and praised discrimination in favor of men. Among her statements: "I think men should be at the head of everything," "He asked if a man could do it better and he said 'yes!'" "I thought there is something different about this church and then I realized the men are in charge at this church. I've been in churches where the women just come in and take over but the men are in charge at this church. That's the way I like it!"

I was attending tradition-oriented churches so I was subjected to an almost constant diet of confused "submit to men/hate men" messages. Mom bragged to a friend, "Tina's not going to get interested in boys. I've poisoned her against them." She also hated "women's libbers" because "a lot of 'em are queers!" Both male homosexuality and lesbianism were spoken of in our home as things almost monstrous.

As I result of the inundation of sex-role cross-signals, I began experiencing fits of rage. I kept it inside, or thought I did, but couldn't concentrate or respond properly to the "here-and-now" because of the feeling that a battle was being fought inside me. It was horrible to go off into these fits and I finally worked up the courage to express my anguish to Mom.

I had just suffered through a rage. I found her in the kitchen with my brother Alan, then a toddler. Terribly anxious, I said, "Mom, why do you always tell me bad things about men? Why are you always trying to get me mad at them?"

"I guess that's the way I told you because that's the way my mother always told me," she replied, "and I've heard other women say things like that."

"I wish you wouldn't say things like that," I said.

But of course she didn't stop anymore than she would stop befouling her breasts with snot-dirtied tissues: her mother had done it.

The battle of the dirty Kleenexes was fought from the time I was in junior high school until I was away at college. Mom asked me why I didn't want to come home for a weekend visit. I told her it was because I couldn't stand always seeing dirty Kleenexes around.

"When I was growing up," Mom said, "my mother taught me that we were supposed to save every little thing."

I went home that weekend. She had finally decided that the comfort and company of her daughter were more important than the one-hundredth of a penny she might save by reusing tissues.

While the compulsive saving of snot-defiled tissues stopped when I was in my mid-twenties, the results lasted for much longer.

At one lengthy point in my life, I became fixated on my breasts. As is common among women, I focused on their size. Like my mother's, mine were small, even smaller than hers. They disappeared under clothes. I obsessed over the lack of anything that could fill me out. However, I couldn't bring myself to wear falsies or padded bras because that seemed like false advertising.

I couldn't stand to wear bras that fastened in the back because they reminded me of Mom's.

My breasts were about the size of cherries, just bumps of loose flesh around the nipples. I had a steady boyfriend, Tom, and we decided on an open relationship. We had not had penile-vaginal intercourse. I had firmly decided that I never wanted children and equally firmly knew I did not want an abortion on my conscience so I remained a virgin to vaginal sex until I underwent a tubal ligation at the age of twenty-four.

Desperate to attract men, I went through a period when I not only went braless but usually wore see-through blouses. If I wasn't showing my breasts off, I was nervously self-conscious about their invisibility.

I was able to develop a little because a young woman told me that her breasts had grown when she went on the Pill. I started on the Pill (while still abstaining from vaginal intercourse) and sure enough, the cherries filled out a bit and became lemon-sized. Tom was pleased. "They used to feel kind of empty," he remarked. "Now they feel more spongy."

My self-consciousness about their size remained constant for years even though I received assurance from a variety of men that I was indeed sexually attractive. I did not connect my breast fixation with my mother's breast defilement until I talked about the Kleenexes to a counselor who said, "Breast issues" and I saw the link. I was desperate to prove that my breasts were something lovely and desirable rather than a place to keep something dirty. I wanted to know that being a woman did not mean being a walking trashcan.

These days, I am pretty happy with my breasts. I have had breast augmentation. It was very expensive. It was also worth it. The doctor took me to what I consider exactly the right level because I can fill a C-cup and show off cleavage when I want to but I am not so top-heavy that my breasts will automatically show themselves off if I choose to downplay them. Unlike most large-breasted women my age, I can also enjoy the comfort of going braless most of the time since they don't sag. To this day, I can only stand to wear bras that fasten in the front, a type Mom did not wear and that don't remind me of dirty tissues.

I have also tried to understand my mother's behavior. As with her man-hating messages, in her compulsive saving she was being loyal to her own mother whom she has always regarded as a good woman. Mom was raised in a rural area during the Great Depression when many people developed a fixation on saving. The sort of saving could become obsessive as it did for my grandmother who inculcated it into my mother. That saving often meant defeating something's purpose. Mom saved and reused cotton balls that she had used to clean her face with astringent even though instead of really cleaning her skin, she was rubbing the dirt back into it. Similarly, the Kleenex was invented to replace the handkerchief so people could get rid of the germs that caused colds and other minor illnesses. The original slogan under which it was sold was, "Why carry a cold in your pocket?"

While I have attempted to see my mother's side, I cannot accept it even though I can to some extent understand it. There is nothing that can make me believe I deserved to have dirty tissues waved in my face. The comfort of her child should have been more important to her than the tiny amount of money she believed she was saving. Her compulsion contributed to my developing the disability that has robbed me of much of the earning potential I would have had as a psychologically healthy person. Compulsive saving can lead to awesome waste.