Milks, Breasts, and Bullshit
I was seven when I ran past my mother and grandmother, who were talking about whatever two grown Black women talk about when no one else is listening, when the protrusions from under my tank top caught my grandmother’s attention. “Oh! She got milks,” she said in a confounded, awe-inspiring voice mixed with a bit of intrusion and knowingness. I was only seven.
Milks, a.k.a. budding breasts, demarcated a change from innocence to an undefined state of being. Having newly developed breasts did not make me a woman, and to my grandmother, I was not a child. I was an enigma. A strange breasted being—an alien of sorts. Before that, my breasts were just there, existing on my body. Then, suddenly, they became the framework for how people treated me; how they spoke to me, and about me. Touching, poking, and squeezing were just some liberties that people took with my body. My grandmother, especially and not exceptionally, had a habit of patting my chest as I walked by her. “Oh! Girl, them things are getting big,” she said. My milks, my body, were no longer mine. They belonged to any adult or authority that boldly but unrightfully staked claim to them. They colonized my body for their pleasure; primarily for exhibition, degradation, and plain old entertainment. They gave no thought to me or my agency over my body. My body was theirs. My breasts were theirs. I was merely a steward.
As I got older, people hated my breasts, especially old women and young girls. “You’re not grown” was a phrase that my grandmother and the other elderly women recited to me often for bouncing a little too much for their comfort. To them, any activity that caused my breasts to move was an offense. I could run faster than most girls and play as hard as any boy but in the middle of a game of tag or hide-and-go-seek I’d hear: “Yolanda! Sit your tail down.” Jumping rope, running, or the like were privileges rendered for a smaller body. Not mine.
Twelve-year-old jovial breasts were like Kryptonite to old women, who had long detached from their breasts and saw the firmness and buoyancy of mine as an affront to their womanhood. In the eighth grade, my dear friend’s aunt called me “Sister Full Bosom” whenever I rang the bell to see her. “Sister Full Bosom is here,” she’d say. Even jokingly, it sounded bitter. And when old women weren’t on the attack, young girls were. They’d tease me or bully me because of my big bra size. Or perhaps my breasts repulsed them because they hated theirs for not acting like mine. Or maybe they feared my breasts gave me some advantage with the boys that they didn’t have. No matter the reason, their invidious behavior exhausted me. It was tiring trying to fit in and not have my breasts be the life of the party. Or in the wet dreams of young boys, who whooped and hollered as I walked by. I imagine that they watched too much porn and let their imagination run wild with sexual images of what they could do with my breasts.
My breasts became my shame. The bigger they got, the more I wanted to hide them. There was no shirt big enough to cover them. Even as a thirteen-year-old girl, who loved the latest fashions, I would have willingly and without hesitation worn a burka. Unlike my grandmother, my mother didn't have any hang-ups about my breasts. If she did, she never let me know it. She gratuitously bought me crop tops and fitted shirts. When all the smaller-bodied girls wore one-piece, spandex jumpsuits, my mother made sure to buy me one, too.
My breasts were substantially larger than my mother’s. For all accounts, she was a card-carrying member of what we called the “itty bitty titty committee.” She embraced her small breasts. She could, and still to this day does, go braless without consequence. No one had any expectations of her breasts. She carried the burden of having a big round badonkadonk. Big boobs were one thing, but a big butt obtained different violence, like men shouting, “Hey! You want fries with that shake,” when she walked past a group of them. Or some man, accidentally on purpose bumping into her in the McDonald’s line to cop a feel. I don’t know how my mother internalized the violence. We never spoke about it. Incidentally, I embodied the violence of not only my breasts but my mother’s derriere. Her butt, although well received as a positive body image, was as problematic as my breasts; and she had about as much control over the way the world interpreted her and her body as I did mine.
In a proper world, my growing breasts would be a normal, natural part of puberty. Truth was, I was a Black girl whose body took up too much space. It appropriated textures of womanhood and skated on the fringe of what it meant to be a child. My body was an object that needed to be contained. It needed rules and regulations before I got comfortable existing in a world where boys do not worry about the size of breasts or butts. My body needed protection from not only the unsolicited pleasure of others, but from me as well. Any notion of feeling good and having confidence in my body was shut down before I understood what confidence meant or what it meant to have breasts.
My grandmother’s response to my new breasts was not a recent phenomenon. It was a historical response to the violence Black female bodies have encountered since chattel slavery and anti-Blackness that was ingrained from the beginning in the forms of de-gendering and the gratuitous display of Black women like Sarah Baartman—while sexualizing and fetishizing them all at the same time. Her response was fear manifested as disdain for my developing body. My grandmother, like many Black mothers and Black grandmothers, who feared rape and sexual assault against their daughters and granddaughters, found it easier to desensitize the pleasure centers in my body by punishing me and ridiculing me for undergoing puberty than to correct the behavior of corrupt men who stepped out of bounds.
And while I believe it was a matter of protection and survival, I would have cherished the chance to get acquainted with, to know, and to love my body—to make a connection with my body without impunity. And as a grown woman, I still find it difficult to connect to my body without holding court against its crimes of not being what I want it to be. I chastise my breasts for sagging and not sitting pretty like they once did. I beg my husband to love them when I don’t love them. And yet, I choose to go braless and let my big saggy boobs hang most days. Because while I’m still trying to connect to my breasts (and body), I want my body to be as free as possible.
-Khadijah AbdulHaqq
Khadijah AbdulHaqq is a full-time mother of five and a writer. She lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with her husband, children, and dog, Raven. Khadijah is the author of Nanni’s Hijab, a children’s book on empathy and awareness. She has published works in Sapelo Square, About Islam, and Haute Hijab, to name a few. Khadijah is currently a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. When Khadijah isn’t writing or mothering, she is binging Netflix and Hulu.