The “just you wait” brigade gets a lot of grief online.
And rightly so.
Unsolicited prophecies of doom are not, generally speaking, what any of us want to hear. And for some reason it is, more often than not, the stories of doom and gloom that we just can’t wait to share.
“Just you wait until they say I love you mummy for the first time” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as “just you wait until they catch virus number 184763483 and spend 3 days shitting and vomiting on you simultaneously while you descend into sleep (or lack of) induced psychosis”.
That one makes for a much more riveting story… One that paints you as a brave warrior surviving croc infested waters - or if you're in the UK, Thames Water's finest. (For non-brit’s - that's our water company who are currently pumping literal human shit directly into our rivers and beaches while charging us more for the privilege. Crocodiles would be preferable).
Yes, “just you waiters” are some of the most annoying kinds of people. And while it is natural to want to share your experience, it is true that it is entirely possible to keep some things to yourself. I know this because I have heard many a new mother say, in absolute seriousness, that her newborn is just such a good sleeper, that she's been so lucky and that she thinks she was just blessed with an easy baby while I have been sat there like this:
That shit is tough. But I have managed to keep my mouth shut, because A) I am not a c**t and B) because I know they will likely find out the truth on their own (or with the help of their no longer sleeping 4 month old baby).
Sometimes we really do need to just shut the fuck up.
Anyway. I got one recently. A “just you wait”. It was a good one - not the boring, overdone kind about sleep or bad behaviour. This one was about me.
More specifically - my boobs!
Established readers will know my boobs have been working hard for a while now. A long while, actually. And when your boobs work hard for a while in the way that mine have, they can show up a little differently. Less watermelon, more two raisins in a carrier bag.
The answer to this, I have been informed, is not to simply accept that this is a natural part of the human experience - it is to - you guessed it, get a boob job.
The brief encounter went a bit like this:
Just you wait person: “Are you still feeding?”
Me, about to be ‘just you wait-ed’: “Yes”
Just you wait person ready to hit me with it: “Just you wait until you stop - they’ll disappear completely and then you’ll need a boob job.”
“Need.”
That’s a funny word to put next to a completely cosmetic absolutely not in any way necessary surgical splicing is it not?
Need like the way I need oxygen? Need like the way I need water? Need like the way I need food and shelter? Need like the non-negotiable, without-which-I-will-perish kind of need? Need like the way I need someone to give me a million pounds and a crate of wine and a lifetime supply of crisps? Oh sorry, I got a bit ahead of myself there.
Need, as our parents liked to remind us, is a strong word! ‘Need’ when used in place of ‘want’ makes a fool of me and you.
I am poking fun at this, but the idea you might one day “need” cosmetic surgery is not just being floated by one random chick showing concern for my bazungas.
We are not, as it turns out, talking about fringe thinking here. Cosmetic surgery is booming - it’s increased by over 40% in the last 4 years alone - and breast procedures are among the most commonly performed operations worldwide.
Mothers are, of course, prime targets or as the industry themselves might say, a “key demographic.” Mothers completing their families - that's the phrase they like to use. Like there's a loyalty card somewhere and having a baby gets you enough points to redeem against a boob job.
And it doesn’t stop at boobs. Oh no.
Entire surgical bundles now exist specifically for women who have had children. The “mummy makeover” is in fact a multi-procedure surgical reconstruction package you plan for, save for and schedule around your childcare. We’re talking breasts, tummy, liposuction and - Christ on a bike - fanny lips.
Yes. Fanny lips.
I discovered this while researching this very piece a while ago and before I knew what had happened I had written an entirely separate article about it because it simply could not be contained. I’ll leave it here. You’re welcome. And I’m sorry.
Anyway, boobs. Back to the boobs.
The words of a woman telling me I will need a boob job once I’ve finished feeding my son whir around my head. Not because they have offended me or because I think she is right - they haven’t and she is not. I have the self esteem of a woman who’s tits have fed a child for over 3 years and the general give-a-shit reserves of someone who hasn’t had an undisturbed night sleep for nearly 4. You might say that I am a woman who has bigger problems than her baps. The reason her words whir around my head is because of how normal all of this has become. How casually we now talk about cutting, lifting, tightening and restoring parts of ourselves like we’re discussing taking the kids to Build a Bear.
There was a time we would at least have had a little shame… Do you remember when Kylie Jenner swore blind her suddenly enormous lips (the ones on her face you dirty little bugger!) were just the result of lip liner while the rest of us were sat there like…
That whole era feels almost quaint now. Because fast forward a few years and she’s not just admitting to cosmetic procedures - she’s giving out implant specifications on TikTok like she’s recommending a good air fryer. Size, placement, surgeon’s name. “Hope this helps lol.”
Cosmetic intervention has moved from celebrity secret to consumer content- from scandal to lifestyle. From something you might do if you were rich and famous - to something you, the average Jane next door, plan for, save for and document in a “spend the morning with me, mum of a 16 month old, 3 days post boob job” vlog while your toddler potters about not understanding why you’re wincing and can’t pick them up anymore. (This is a real video I watched).
I saw one the other day and it slowly dawned on me that I was watching a woman recover from major surgery in exactly the same format I used to watch people show me what they'd bought in Primark. Somewhere between Zoella's £3 slogan T-shirts and now we appear to have normalised post-operative recovery as lifestyle content.
I can’t tell you the amount of videos I see like this. Women who look like they’ve been in a near fatal car accident casually rocking up on Instagram to share their ‘journey’ like they would if they were recommending a TV series. Some even arrive crying over eyes that have gone wonky or something not sitting right and the sudden realisation that they don’t actually recognise themselves anymore.
The comment sections on these videos are full of other women who have had the same procedures - piling in with don't worry girly you're still swollen, mine did exactly the same, everything settles, you're going to look incredible, just give it time. The kind of warmth and solidarity you'd want if you'd just had a really bad smear test or your cat had died, deployed entirely in the service of reassuring each other that the face or the body they voluntarily paid someone to cut open is going to be fine.
Meanwhile I’m sat there thinking fuck, wouldn’t it be great if this kind of energy could be levied at women before they end up under a surgeons knife?
It's funny because when I was growing up, cosmetic surgery in pop culture meant one thing. You were the villain, or the cautionary tale - or both.
Entire characters were built around it. Think Regina George’s mum in Mean Girls whose boobs are introduced by Gretchen Weiners when she told us they were “hard as rocks” before her Chihuahua starts casually gnawing on one of the implants through her top while she chats away, blissfully unaware (a detail I have since learned was achieved by pinning a cocktail sausage inside Amy Poehler's bra. Hollywood baby!)
That was the joke. The fake boobs were the joke and the woman who'd had them was the joke. She was sad and vain and desperately trying to be her daughter's best friend and the dog was eating her tit and she didn't even notice.
Then there was Jennifer Coolidge's wicked stepmother in A Cinderella Story, who spends the entire film frantically chasing youth while at one point barking “Not my face! It's much newer than the girls! Go for the girls!” when she was about to get lamped by Rhonda.
These Real Housewives types existed largely to remind us that chasing eternal youth would eventually leave you orange, overfilled and divorced. Cosmetic surgery wasn't lifestyle, it was satire.
Now not getting anything done feels weirdly performative - like you're trying to prove something - almost as though you’re taking a position. Like being vegan. Or refusing to get WhatsApp. I sometimes wonder whether in another ten years saying you’re still in possession of your original face and tits will carry the same vibe as announcing you don't own a television. Like, ohhhhh, you’re one of them are you? Think you’re better than us do you?
And while I genuinely couldn't care less whether women I've never met get their tits jacked up, I do care about the subtle sell of it. We're very fond of blaming the beauty industry or the patriarchy and fair enough - they've all had a right good go over the years. But I think they can all just put their feet up for a bit because it seems we've got this one covered. Covered in conversations and passing comments and advice between women given in the practical, slightly exhausted wisdom sharing of women trying to help each other get through the day.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN’T GOT A EWAN THE SHUSHING SHEEP? HE KEPT MY LITTLE KENNETH ASLEEP 7-7 AND I ONLY HAD TO SAY NO TO A DRINK 16 TIMES.”
“Don’t remortgage your house to buy Pampers - their poonami ads are LIES. The Sainsbury’s own brand nappies are actually really good at containing shit.”
“Just you wait until you’ve finished feeding, they’ll disappear and you’ll need a boob job.”
Casual.
When this woman with her unsolicited prophecy of doom leaned in to tell me what was coming for my boobs once I stopped feeding she was not delivering news or pulling back a curtain. I did not come to this conversation fresh. These are not the boobs of a woman who doesn’t know what’s coming. They have gone from full to flat and back again more times than I can count. I have woken up at 6am looking like Katie Price circa 2001 and gone to bed looking like I have two socks on my chest with a grape in each.
She is also not the first person to notice that breastfeeding changes the shape of your breasts, a fact that has been known to women since the beginning of time and was definitely known to me given that I have been at this for 3 and a half years and have had a fairly front row seat to the whole thing.
The only difference is that I simply do not care. The fucks to give jar is empty like my tits will one day be and there is absolute radio silence from the part of my brain that is supposed to be troubled by this.
Because those boobs she was worried about on my behalf, well, they’ve been working hard.
They were working hard when I was pregnant, leaking in the night, leaving damp sheets and fake tan streaks. They were working hard when we sat in our living room at 38 weeks, milking me like a cow. Colostrum into tiny little syringes, labelled with dates and put into the freezer next to the frozen blueberries. They were working hard when at minutes old, my baby in his knitted green hat, latched for the first time. They were working hard through those first days and nights at home when nothing made sense and everything was a bit scary and the only thing that worked, reliably, without fail, was them. They have worked hard every time he has fallen. They have worked hard every time he is sad. They have worked hard every time he is sick. They have worked hard as a pillow, a comfort, a twiddle toy (god help me), and something to reach for in the night when the room is dark and unnerving. They have worked hard after days apart and they have worked hard during days together. They have worked hard at being the most reliable thing in his world and they have done so for 3 years running.
I actually saw a video recently of a woman describing her post breastfeeding boobs and I have thought about it every day since. She said they’d become French. Old lady French. And I knew instantly what she meant. The kind you can wear a vest with and no bra not because they are all perky and young but because they are just tits. The kind you see on a woman in her seventies in a village in Provence who has lived a full and excellent life and is absolutely not thinking about her boobs because she is too busy drinking wine and being chic. She is free.
When I think of my tits I think of two old pals. Wise and experienced and lived in. Like a really good leather jacket that fits perfectly because you've worn it everywhere or a book with a cracked spine and dog eared pages that you've read so many times you know exactly where all your favourite bits are. I think of them like I think of an old house that has stood for centuries and seen everything - multiple families and babies born within its rooms, people coming and going, and trees growing tall outside windows that have watched it all. Walls that have absorbed decades of noise and life and love and loss until the very bricks seem to hum with it. A house that when you walk inside of it you feel something - something you cannot manufacture or install or purchase on a payment plan. Something that exists only because of everything that has happened there.
You cannot get that from a new build. A new build looks like everyone else’s - identical to the one next door and the one next to that. Everything in the right place and nothing out of order and absolutely no sense that anything has ever really happened there at all.
Perfect, maybe. But dead inside.
To get a boob job would be to make me a new build. And I am not a new build.
I am a Georgian house. The kind I grew up in - wonky walls filled with horse hair and creaking floorboards and a sprawling garden where children have always played. Where the grass is worn thin in the places that matter and the trees are tall and gnarly and welcoming and filled to the brim with fruit.
Nothing that has held this much life needs renovating.
I am Grade II listed bitches, you can’t touch a damn thing.
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