I'm not usually in my pajamas before 6 Pm on a Saturday, but there was a sports bra incident.

WARNING!

Today's post deals with ladies underthings.  TODD and TOM....and all the rest of you guys out there who come up to me and say, "Hey, you need to warn us when you're going to talk about stuff like your underwear, " CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED!

Okay, now then.  Sports bras. There are so many women at the gym who wear cute sports bras with kicky colors under their cute sports shirts (you know the ones where you can sweat like a racehorse and it doesn't cling to all your gut lumps and back fat?), but guess what?  There are no sports bras for women above a certain...girth.  Sure, if I were built like BARBIE with a 32 DDDD I would definitely fine a fun sports bra that looked good and held the girl glands in place.

But I'm built more like Barbie's fluffy cousin Brad.  I'm more girthy at this point in my life than girlie. That does NOT mean I don't want a cute sports bra with a kicky color to wear under my cute sports shirt. I have a cute sports shirt. 

To be fair, I have found a couple sports bras that might fit...if they weren't made of material about as stretchy as Scarlett O'Hara's corset.  And since I don't have Mammy to boss me around and lace me up, I have to get the thing over my head and around my girl glands all on my own.

Which brings me to second problem I have with sports bras.  Given the state of my hands...my advanced arthritis and the current crippling effects of carpal tunnel to my right hand, I and not able to fasten a normal bra without excruciating pain.  And a sports bra take a whole different sort of approach because there's a lot more hand motion. If you have the right one, however, it's an easy on and off.  Some of my male readers have now drifted in the land of memories....when they struggled with that whole on and off motion of their beloved's bra.  Let's let them stare into space for three...two...one.

Welcome back, gents.  So anyway I was at Kohl's today in a futile effort to find something in my size. They have four city blocks of exercise clothes for the S, the XS, and the XXS.  

For those of us north of XL?  

Two arms on one rack.

Let me remind you all that the statistic in the US is that 52% of all women 18-49 have purchased plus sized clothing.  You'd THINK...YOU'D THINK these clothing stores would like to get a bigger slice of more than 50% of the female buying market.  At the very LEAST you'd think these stores would like to encourage fluffy girls to work out and get thinner.  OR AT LEAST there would be a movement to make more clothes for fluffy girls to wear so that so unsightly bulges or lumps or back fat would go uncovered.  Nope.

After searching the women's department I headed over to the TIMES SQUARE of shopping that is the Misses department. Hubby and I looked among the SIX HANGING RACKS of sports bras...not an XXL to be found. 

"You know what?  I said in my outdoor voice as we gave up the search.  "BIG GIRLS WANT TO LOOK CUTE WHEN THEY WORK OUT TOO!  BUT NO!  JUST THE XS GIRLS GET THE CUTE BRAS."

There was an XS girl standing about four feet from me. She started to laugh.  I gave her my death stare, that look that says, "Keep laughing, Stick Figure, and I'll find a way to sit on you and break all the little calcium deficient bones in your body, provided you haven't already had them removed so that you can be a size NEGATIVE 1!"

So we went to the store that understands all the best worst things in the US:  Walmart.  Where can a big girl go to get her snack cakes at 2 in the morning?  Walmart. where can a girl down on her luck go to drink wine ad eat donuts while riding a scooter?  Walmart.  Where can the super obese go to show off their new leggings/jeggings/bikini?  Walmart.

And sure enough...we weren't ten feet in the door and I found an entire rack of XXL sports bras. I got the XL and the XXL because the XL was my actual dress size, but it's Walmart, so the sizes tend to run small.  (Way to make a girl feel good there Walmart...but I suppose that drives up the sales of wine and Little Debbie's.)  I bought them, took them home and gleefully tried to get into the XL.

The elastic was clearly not light enough for my hands. And I wasn't about the cripple myself further to salve my ego.  I am what I am.  so I pulled on the XXL...and I spent about ten minutes unrolling the padding that had, in the course of getting pulled on, rolled up into a sort of tube inside the lining of the bra.  

I was okay with the fit and feel. I liked the adjustable straps.  But...and here's the key to the whole thing...I couldn't get out of the thing.

I didn't have the hand strength to pull the bra back up over my head. Not without shattering pain.  I attempted, against my better judgement and probably everything resembling common sense, to roll the thing off going down over my gut.  Yeah...the gut it could handle but I didn't need to roll that too far to know that the BUTT was going to be the uncrossable mountain.

I couldn't move it up and I couldn't move it down and I was sweating so much (have you tried putting on or removing a sports bra when your skin is wet? Yeah, it's not possible.) I knew there was no way I was getting this thing off.   So I do what any woman who has come to value avoidance of pain over her ego:  I called down the hall for my husband's help.

He walked into the room and I was standing there in my grey sweat pants and this bright yellow bra which was twisted in two separate directions and clearly cutting off circulation to portion of my body.  To his credit, the man did not laugh.  He got me out of it like a true gentleman.

And then we decided to see if I could find a sports bra that closes in the front.  I'm sure they're out there...but the pictures of the ones I've seen are neither cute nor kicky...they're beige.  Because that's the color of the shame I must feel now that I'm too big for cute colors and too crippled to get in and out of the ones that do fit.

And so the search continues.