In Persuit of Understanding

    Do any of us truly understand our children?  The day my ten-year-old son, Jason, told me he was handling his puberty very well I nearly drove into the ditch.  Little did I know this was merely a preview of things to come with this precocious youngster.
    I didn’t grow up around boys.  There was just my sister, who longed desperately to be an only child, and me.  Boys were icky, dirty little people that ate snails and teased girls.  Besides that, they had cooties.  Blessed with a healthy baby boy at 35, I had no idea what I was in for.
    As I mentioned, Jason was precocious.  At 13, he and his friends were talking about the chicks they’d seen while cruising the mall the day before and I innocently asked what was so great about them.  Six baby-faced young men came up with six different versions of cleavage with some very inappropriate gestures, and a rabid gleam in their eyes.
      I wouldn’t have thought anymore about it except a couple of days later, his little sister Brittany asked if I thought she’d need a bra by the end of fourth grade.  So I got to wondering what the big deal was.  I never had cleavage until Jason was born and then God got even.  Frankly, I thought it was highly overrated.  Nevertheless I set out to do a little research on my own to understand the fascination on behalf of both my children.
    The logical place to start was the internet, and in my ignorance I typed in the simple word “cleavage”.  What popped up on my screen wasn’t fit to be viewed in a dark room all by myself.  My face glowed like a radioactive torch.  Furtively, I checked over my shoulder to see if any of the kids had wandered in.  I was feeling like a wanted criminal.  Do real people look at that stuff?  If the neighborhood mothers knew, I was sure to be arrested for child pornography.  Quickly, I abandoned that line of research.
    What better place to look next than to a little girl’s favorite toy?  Dolls, no matter how crude, have been around practically since the dawn of human history.  So I got out Brittany’s favorite Barbie dolls to see what made them so popular.  Compared to the androgynous Raggedy Ann, Betsy Wetsy, Miss Revlon and Betsy McCall that I grew up with, Barbie is an Amazon of totally unrealistic proportions.  Why don’t they just give her a leotard with one breast bared, a spear and a shield?  If she could yodel like Tarzan, so much the better.  No human being is built like that.  She doesn’t walk or talk.  About the only thing you can do with a Barbie is pose her in her many outfits with her cars, pools, ponies, motorcycles and on and on.
    But what makes Barbie popular?  It has to be the cleavage.  Otherwise she’s nothing but an empty-headed plaything with glitzy clothes, big hair, cars, and a boyfriend named Ken.  And of course little girls want to look like Barbie so they can have all the toys and boys too.  I’ve even heard of women having cosmetic surgery in order to resemble this icon of modern popularity
      Not satisfied, I delved deeper into the mysteries of cleavage.  Movies were my next resource.  After my experience with the internet, I was afraid to view the most current box office fare.  So I returned to my youth once again.  The rage of the mid-sixties was the beach party movies with Frankie and Annette.  Every one of them was awful.  The acting was horrible, the story was non-existent, the directing was worse, but there was plenty of cleavage.  By today’s standards it was all very tame, yet these movies captured the imagination of countless teenage males. 
      With the misconception that I was now ready to tackle some hands on (so to speak) research I laid out a plan of action.  Saturday morning dawned and my research team arrived as prearranged.  Jason and three of his friends piled into the van to accompany me to the mall.  Brittany tagged along in the hope of getting some new clothes. 
    Numerous candidates were reconnoitered and the boys resigned themselves to the difficult task at hand.  Some chicks were too tall, too short, too plain or downright ugly.  Others were too skinny, knock-kneed, had flat buns or a multitude of other inherited natural defects that did not meet their critical standards.  Not one of the young ladies stood out as memorable to my team of unbiased researchers.
    Then disaster struck.  The six of us were disembarking from the up escalator when a pair of cantaloupe-like breasts encased in a postage sized, damp appearing t-shirt strolled past.  Not one of the boys could tell you what the young lady’s face looked like or whether she was blond, brunette or a redhead, but she had cleavage.  In fact, she had CLEAVAGE.
    Major carnage was some how avoided as the boys tumbled off the escalator and over each other trying to get a better view.  I barely dragged Brittany to safety before she did a cartwheel over the writhing, slobbering, incoherent mass of prepubescent masculinity on the floor.  Shoppers were stacking up on the escalator behind them and other braver souls were doing their best to step around the boys.  Mall security was quickly converging on us to determine the source of the disturbance.
    “Get your stuff,” I snarled grabbing the closest boy by the collar,”we’re going home.”  My children would just have to go through life being totally misunderstood.  I’d had enough research for one day.