Nina Lichtenstein

If my breasts had not been involved with such a splash when they hit the surface, I might not remember so clearly that day when I jumped from the thirty-foot diving tower. Despite the delightful sounds of my sons’ joy and giddiness cheering and whistling me on in cahoots with my best friend Anne, it’s my breasts that have played the role of Proust’s madeleine. I remember it all so clearly because of them.

I am standing on the platform of the diving board ten meters up in the air at the outdoor public pool in Oslo, Norway, my childhood city. Not a cloud in the sky—a bright, blue expanse above the happy sounds of children and adults as they swim laps, frolic, and slide below. There are five pools in this water park which was a huge, fond part of my childhood and teen years. Adrenaline fizzes in my limbs and my heart thumps in my ears as I squirm toward the edge. Lined along the stone border of the round, deep pool, way down there, my three middle-school-aged sons cheer me on. The lifeguard, a tanned, blond, young woman in white shorts and tee-shirt with a red cross on its back, gives jumpers the signal by pressing a megaphone to her lips and calling out, “Stand back on the five and seven, go ahead on ten!” That’s me, the “ten.”

I am about to launch myself freestyle from ten meters up. I will my toes to the tip of the board and I try not to notice how far away the thirty-three feet to the surface below looks from here; this is what my best friend, Anne—wild, lovable Anne, also a mother of three—has just convinced me to do: “Jump!”

I hear Anne and my boys call out.

“Come on, mamma! You can do it!”

There is no way out now. The whole park is a movie on pause. I’m out of my body and somewhere else. In a flash, I’m back to my childhood, when life depended on being cool enough to jump.

But I am not a teenager anymore, I am forty-two, and This is ridiculous, I hear myself think. I don’t have to prove anything to anybody! I consider that I can and should turn around and climb back down the gleaming and narrow concrete steps, to safety on the ground.

“Go ahead on ten!” the lifeguard’s voice jars me back. The boys cheer again. Anne whistles loudly.

Ending the torture, I leap. After the initial flapping of my arms, I instinctively slap them tightly alongside my thighs, in order to keep my body vertical for impact. Don’t flap your arms! Straight as a nail! My brain repeats. Splash! Then the muffled sound of water all around me as I sink, sink, sink to the depth of the pool, followed by the exhilarating feeling as I reach the water’s surface and gasp. I did it!

What also happened the moment my forty-two-year-old body hit the surface, is that my breasts took a beating. I came to find out that the full-bodied frame of a woman who has nursed three babies impacts the water differently than that of the lanky teenager I was back in the 1970s. And, I didn’t know it then, but the effect of this accidental violence to my boobies would lead to a situation where I’d suffer a more perverse but subtle variety of violence.

Once out of the pool, my kids flocked around me, patting my back and hugging my waist as water dripped from my bathing suit, and I tried to ignore that my breasts ached as if they had been beaten by a long wooden board. The boys thought I was the coolest mamma around, and Anne—God bless her playfulness—tried to coax me into doing it one more time. “It’s always better the second time!” she cajoled. I deflected by offering the kids ice cream.

The next day I discovered a red and sore lump, warm and hard on the side of my right breast. I felt feverish. And so, I found myself at the doctor’s office telling the funny story of my foolish mid-life bravery, while the sixty-something physician felt around for what I guessed was an inflammation. And, sure enough, he announced a case of acute mastitis and prescribed a course of antibiotics with hot compresses. The problem was, he didn’t just examine my breasts.

It is my breasts that urge me onward to remember and witness the behavior of the older, white, privileged male physician toward his younger, female patient. Just the doctor and I were in his office, and the door was closed. He was seated at his wooden desk in a Scandinavian design office chair, framed photos lined all the surfaces behind him: The Doctor running across a finish line at a marathon, the Doctor riding a horse on a tropical beach, the Doctor on a sailboat, salty and windswept, and the Doctor and his family skiing.

While I sat bare-chested in a seat at the short end of his desk, he rolled his chair over to perform his exam by palpating my breasts. The thing is, he did not pull his hands away once he had identified the inflamed lump. Instead, his hands remained there on me, warm, confident, each one gently cupping a breast while lifting them from below, the way a push up bra works.

He looked straight at me and said, “Well, you do have particularly well-formed breasts…”

A flush of heat spread in my face. Are you kidding me? I am embarrassed to admit it, but I think I just smiled and said, “well, thank you,” as if his words and actions were a gentleman-y thing. It wasn’t right all along, but I neither did nor said anything else. I sat humiliated and confused, bare breasted and hearing the words I couldn’t believe I was hearing. I cowered, yet for some reason remained stoic (the part of my Nordic DNA I’ve had to work hard to de-program, for my emotional and mental health well-being).

I was a forty-two-year old married mother of three, a self-confident and independent woman with a PhD, who, as far as I knew, did not come across as submissive or vulnerable. Of course, none of this matters in the dynamics of sexual harassment, just like it mattered not to him whether I was weak or strong; to him I was fair game, just like all the other women he had most likely made inappropriate comments to and advances toward in his long, illustrious career as a family doctor.

Today, I feel shame and self-criticism that I did not say what I could have: “Excuse me, but do you think this is acceptable? Are you out of your fucking mind? Who do you think you are?” Anything would have been better than what I said and didn’t do. I was not an insecure teenager, not like I had been when the male gynecologist caressed my butt after I hopped down from the exam table after my first ever OBGYN visit, in 1982 when I was seventeen. I should have spoken up then, and I should have in 2006. At least I wish I had.

Shrugging it off as gross, male conduct, I have imagined both doctors have since happily retired, with zero bad conscience about their boorish behavior. I admit to lately wishing that they have had to face their accusers and deal with the consequences of their unwanted touching. I have wished…

When I pay attention to the emotional and muscle memories that my breasts carry, many remembrances reveal themselves: How as a thirteen year old I wished my breasts could grow bigger already, like the other Nina in my grade, who got so much attention from the boys; how as a young mother in my late twenties and early thirties I relished the profoundly intimate, privileged moments of nursing my three sons; how I discovered my nipples as delicious erogenous zones in my forties, and how in my fifties, post-menopausal, I’ve been bummed that they are the first to go as I make what feels like unfair, herculean efforts to shed weight.

Whatever the remembrances are, I’m thankful my body helps me in this journey of living an examined life. In quiet communion with my breasts, feet, hands, belly and nose (and the list goes on) I continue to discover a treasure trove of flickers from my past. I patiently consider these gems, gently turning them this way and that, and find comfort in what is revealed: A life—my life as I know it—grounded in this imperfect but perfectly precious body.