Bra-vo!

"Look, Mom!” my 4-year-old son howled, racing around Target’s lingerie department with a padded bra slung over his tiny shoulders. “I made a booby backpack!”

“Keep it down, pal,” I said. “We’re just getting started. Let’s try to be cool here.”
 

He high-fived a pair of granny panties and did a little scissor kick in the air, nearly taking out the adjacent rack of bikini briefs.

No wonder 85 percent of women are wearing the wrong size bra. Who can concentrate?

You know, parents love to believe that their lives are so much more meaningful and fulfilling than those of their childless peers. They’ll say, “You can’t possibly plumb the vast and glorious depths of joy until you’ve given life to another human being.”

Don’t be fooled. Of course you can plumb the depths of joy. You can shop for underwear alone.

By the time I corralled my bras, my son and his plus-size imagination into the dressing room, things started heating up. “Actually, Mom, this is not a booby backpack I’m wearing! It’s a super-duper-fire-hero-oxygen-packety-pack-pack yada yada hot burning rescue … ”

Half listening to his breathless play-by-play of an imaginary fire that threatened to reduce our dressing room to smoldering ash, I began to disrobe. While he stopped, dropped and rolled, I climbed out of my sundress.

“I’ll save us!” my boy shouted, slamming his body into the door, busting open the lock, and exposing me to half a dozen mortified onlookers. With a resounding THWACK, the door hit the exterior wall. And stayed there. Wide open. Because God doesn’t have HBO to entertain Him; He has to watch me.

I dashed into the hall, curtsied and pulled the door shut.

“What were you thinking?” I hissed.

My son looked up at me, eyes wide in terror.

 “I’m buck naked, and you decide to break down the door?”
 
 

“Sorry!” he said. “I didn’t mean to!”
 
 

Sincere as he sounded, I still had to teach the boy a lesson. (Underwear shopping with your mother is a privilege, young man! Not a right.)

I looked him in the eye.
 
 

“After your little performance here today,” I told him gravely, “I will never take you bra shopping again.”

Brutal. I know.

“Never?” he asked, eyes brightening.

You heard me, buddy.

“Never ever?” he tried to confirm, this time holding out a contract for me to sign and date.

“Never ever,” I said.

Cross my heart.