This essay was compelling and easy to read because it had several themes that I thought intertwined nicely. Coming of age, would be the first and probably most obvious one because it was all about how she thought of breasts as a symbol of not only womanhood but also adulthood. I felt like she told a story about how becoming an adult is different from becoming a woman, and she had several markers of womanhood such as menstruating, marriage, intercourse, and of course, her breasts. When those milestones didn't come about as she wanted them to or expected, her whole journey of maturation of womanhood was thrown off, but not necessarily maturation as an adult. All of this maturation and growing up was juxtaposed by a immature seeming competitiveness with her best friend as a kid, but also with her supposed mother in law and people in her life as a grown woman. Her struggle with her personal perception of her body was representative of the struggle many women have against the patriarchy. There are certain societal expectations of women that many internalize as girls in the form of insecurity, and I thought the author was portraying this by listing all the types of bras she would wear, the unsatisfying feedback she would get, and eventually the competitiveness that engulfed her world.
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