The case of the disappearing bra

I may be losing my marbles. I have, in fact, lost my bra. I’m not sure which is worse.

Not just any bra, mind you, but one of the fancy ones I bought this summer at Bra Chic. Remember the cherry red one that made me look 10 lbs thinner and five years younger and added 20 points to my IQ score? Yeah, that one. It disappeared somewhere between bedtime last night and first thing this morning. Poof! Sheesh, I am really starting to get a complex about things disappearing around here.

Last night, I took off my bra as I always do, the very last thing before crawling into bed. The other clothes I was wearing went into the hamper, and the bra got placed somewhere along the seven step route from my bathroom to my pillow. I don’t know where exactly, because it’s such a mundane series of movements that I honestly can’t conjure them out of my subconscious to know at exactly which point I let go of the bra, but I know for a fact that I’d already checked on all three boys and can testify beyond a shadow of a doubt that I did not leave the room in between disrobing and crawling under the covers.

Things go missing with rather alarming frequency in our house. I’m used to searching for things. The TV remote probably consumes the largest portion of my search time, largely because we have the kind of furniture that swallows things whole into its voluminous folds. But we lose other things regularly, too: partly because of the curious toddler who doesn’t see it as in any way irrational that he puts my car keys into the dishwasher or my memory cards into his older brother’s shoe, partly because Beloved and I are both the sort of people who put things down on the nearest flat surface the moment we lose interest in them, and partly because we are living in a rather constant state of low-level chaos in which disorder is the rule rather than the exception.

So yes, things disappear. Often. Permission forms, bank cards, lenses… but I do not usually lose my undergarments. Especially the expensive ones.

Most ironically, the recently painted master bedroom is the least-cluttered room in the house. There are no piles of papers, no baskets of unfolded laundry, no heaps of mismatched toys in which a bra could hide along the seven-step path I traversed from bathroom to bed last night. And since all three boys were asleep before I went to bed until after I got up there’s no way I can blame the usual suspects. Barring a midnight raiding party on a bra-snatching mission in the dark of night, which I’d like to think I would have heard rumbling through the bedroom, or some sort of Bermuda Triangle for undergarments inside the wing chair in the corner, there is simply no way that bra could or should be anywhere outside the four-square-meter boundary of the bathroom-to-bed route.

It’s not like I didn’t search. I got down on my belly and looked under the bed, lifted the corner of the mattress and pulled the sheets off the bed. I took the cushion off the wing chair. I rifled through the dirty clothes hamper, finding everything I wore yesterday except the bra and another two days worth of discarded clothes — but no bra. I looked under the dog’s bed and unfolded a basket of towels sitting not even in my bedroom but in the hallway beside the linen cupboard, waiting to be put away. I looked under my bathrobe, hanging benignly behind the bathroom door. I pulled everything out of my underwear drawer, twice, despite the fact that I knew that I had not opened that drawer last night. I even looked inside my pillow cases. Nothing.

Fearing for my sanity, after the first ten minutes of searching I called in the boys, whom I could hear watching cartoons downstairs. (Ten minutes? Is a really long time to search a small room for something. Try it, you’ll be amazed how many times you can retrace the same patterns and still find nothing.) I asked them to look around and see if they could find my bra. I gotta say, I never could have predicted the day I would ask my schoolage boys to help me find my underwear. Not just any underwear, either — not beige or white or cream underwear that might more easily blend into the soft shadows of my underlit bedroom, but brilliant cherry-red underwear.

They couldn’t find it either.

In the end, I had to give up. I’m wearing one of my old nursing bras, because my other favourite fancy bra is in the hamper underneath a damp towel. I know it’s there because I dumped the hamper three times this morning, each time more sure than the last that I was losing my mind instead of — or perhaps as well as? — my undergarments.

I think I’m going to have to make up a sign, like for lost puppies, and put it up on the lamp-posts in my neighbourhood. “Have you seen my bra? Reward!”

If nothing else, I’m thinking I’m going to have to capitulate one of these days and give my vexatious breasts their own damn category on the blog…

Author: DaniGirl

Canadian. storyteller, photographer, mom to 3. Professional dilettante. View all posts by DaniGirl