Summet ad: Read this if you hide the struggle 👆

I cracked a rib last Tuesday. I wasn't in a car. I hadn't fallen down the stairs. I was standing in my own bedroom at seven in the morning, both arms twisted up behind my back, just trying to get dressed. I want to say that out loud because I have not said it out loud, not the real version, not even to my husband of fifty-two years, and I am 73 years old and I have gotten myself dressed every morning of my life and I never once thought the thing that would finally take me down would be the few minutes I spend getting ready in my own bedroom. When the doctor at the urgent care asked how it happened, I told him I'd tripped on the rug. When my daughter asked, I told her I'd caught the edge of the dresser. I have told four different people four different small lies this past week, because the truth is more embarrassing than a cracked rib, and I am going to tell you the truth now because I think there is somebody out there who needs to hear it. It was a Tuesday like any other Tuesday. Hank had already gone down to the diner for his coffee with the men, the way he does. I had gotten myself dressed maybe 26,000 times in my life. I was not dizzy. I was not unwell. I had slept fine. I went to put my bra on. I had both arms up behind my back, working that little hook by feel, the way I have done it every single morning since I was a girl of thirteen. To get my fingers to line it up I had leaned and put my weight onto one foot and turned. And my shoulder went one way and my balance went the other. I came down against the footboard of our bed. I heard it before I felt it, a sound in my own chest like a green branch breaking. Then the pain came up so sharp and so total that I could not get a breath in to call out, which was just as well, because there was nobody in the house to hear me. I got myself onto the floor and I sat against the side of the bed holding my ribs and not moving, because moving was a mistake I only had to make once. I sat there a long time. When I finally stood up I was bent over like a woman thirty years older than I am. I drove myself to the urgent care over in the next town with one hand on the wheel and one arm wrapped around my own middle. They took a picture and told me what I already knew, that I had cracked the seventh rib on my right side, that there was nothing to do for it but rest and time and something for the pain, and to come back if it got hard to breathe. I am going to tell you what happened at the pharmacy while I waited for them to fill that prescription, because what a woman named Wanda said to me in those plastic chairs by the blood pressure machine probably did more for the rest of my life than the X-ray did. And I think there's somebody else out there reading this who needs to hear it. My name is Patsy. I am 73 years old. I live in a small town in Pennsylvania with my husband Hank, who I have been married to for fifty-two years. I ran an alterations and tailoring shop on our main street for almost forty years, hems and zippers and wedding dresses and the occasional prom boy who'd waited until the day before. We have two grown daughters, one an hour off in Harrisburg and one out in Ohio, and a granddaughter named Maddie who is 7 and named my old sewing machine Bernadette and asks me what Bernadette is making every single time she calls. I opened that shop in 1983. I was thirty years old with two little girls and Hank's mill had cut everybody back to three days a week, and I could sew better than anybody in that town, so I hung a sign and I never looked back. I let out and took in this whole county for forty years. I have steady hands and a good eye and I do not make mistakes with other people's clothes. In all those years I went down exactly twice. Once on a patch of ice carrying a wedding gown to my car in 1991, which I have never forgiven the weather for, and once over the cat in 2016, which I have never forgiven the cat for. I am a careful woman. I measure twice. I keep my pins in the cushion and my scissors in the drawer. I hold the railing. I wear sensible shoes. I have not climbed on so much as a footstool in years. But I had been struggling. That is the only way I know how to say it. I had been struggling to get dressed in the mornings. Not failing, exactly. Just fighting that clasp a little longer every month, twisting my arms back a little harder, my shoulders not going where I sent them anymore. It had been coming on for a year, maybe more. Hank had asked me a time or two why I'd quit the Tuesday quilting circle I'd gone to for twenty years. I told him I was tired of it. That was a lie too. I'd quit because I couldn't face the morning it took to get ready and out the door. The mornings had gotten hard in a way that was different than hard. Hard like my own arms would not reach where I told them. Hard like the first thing I had to put on every day, before anything else, had turned into the part of the day I dreaded most. I had been blaming it on getting old. On a right shoulder that had ached since the Reagan years and hands that had sewn themselves stiff. On being 73 and slower than I was. I had not once blamed it on the one thing I could have done something about. And I had told nobody. Not Hank. Not my girls. I had been changing in the bathroom with the door shut so my husband of fifty-two years wouldn't have to watch me fight my way into my own clothes. That is the part I am most ashamed of, and that is the part I will tell you about, because I have a feeling I am not the only one who shuts that door. The pharmacy was busy that afternoon and they told me it would be twenty minutes, so I went and sat in the row of plastic chairs by the blood pressure machine, holding my side, breathing in the shallow little sips that were all the rib would allow. There was a woman already sitting two chairs down. Older than me, with a cane hooked on the chair beside her and a kind, lined face. She watched me lower myself down like I was made of glass. She did not say hello. She said, "Cracked or bruised, hon?" I said, "Cracked. Seventh rib." She nodded like she'd known. "How'd you do it?" And I do not know what it was, the pain or the chairs or that she'd asked me straight out, but I did not give her the rug or the dresser. I looked at this stranger and I said, "I fell down getting dressed. I was reaching behind my back to do up my brassiere and I went over and caught the bed." And then, in a pharmacy, in a row of plastic chairs, in front of a woman whose name I did not yet know, I started to cry. Not over the rib. Over all of it. Over the shut bathroom door and the quilting circle and the year of lying about being tired. She reached over and put her hand on my arm and she let me go until I was done. Then she said, "My mother is ninety-six years old. Three years ago she went down in her bedroom the same way you just did, reaching back for that clasp, and she broke her wrist and she cracked her hip, and she spent eleven weeks in a rehab and we nearly lost her. She'd been fighting to get dressed for two years before that and she never said a word to a soul." I was holding my own ribs and listening. "We thought it was her age. Of course we thought it was her age, she was ninety-three. The doctors thought it was her age. It was not her age, hon. It was something nobody ever thinks to look at." She told me that after the hip, her mother got frightened. Frightened to get dressed, then frightened to be alone, and a woman who had run her own home for seventy years started talking about going somewhere she'd be looked after. Wanda said she couldn't stand it. So she did what you do now, she sat up nights on the computer trying to understand why a sharp, capable woman kept ending up on her own floor. And what she finally understood was that it was not her mother's hip or her mother's age. It was the act of getting dressed itself. The reaching, the twisting behind your own back, the balancing on your feet to do up a hook you cannot see. Those are the hardest things you can ask an old body to do, and her mother was being asked to do them first thing, every single morning. What Wanda found was a tank top with the bra built right into it. No hooks. Nothing to reach behind you for. You step into it the way you'd step into anything, and the support is already there in the front. She put her mother in one the week she came home from rehab. She has gotten dressed standing up, by herself, every single morning for three years since, at ninety-six. Wanda said her mother told her it was the first time in years getting dressed didn't feel like a thing she had to brace for. Wanda squeezed my arm and she said, "Hon, I'm not going to tell you a shirt is a miracle. I'm telling you my ninety-six-year-old mother gets herself dressed every morning now and I get to keep her in her own house. And whatever you've been fighting, you don't have to keep fighting it behind a shut door." I asked her what it was called. She didn't have a pen either, so she had me put it in my phone right there. S, U, M, M, E, T. Summet. I drove home that afternoon at about thirty miles an hour, one arm around my ribs. That night I told Hank everything. Not the rug. The truth. The reaching, the shut bathroom door, the year of it. He was quiet for a while and then he got up and came around the table and just stood there with his hand on my shoulder, and then we sat down with my granddaughter's old laptop and we started reading. I'm going to tell you what we read, because I have a feeling a lot of women my age are fighting the very same fight behind their own shut doors and they don't have a Wanda to sit down next to them in a row of plastic chairs. A regular brassiere asks your body to do four things every morning of your life. It asks you to reach both arms up behind your back. It asks you to turn both shoulders in at the same time. It asks you to line up a hook and an eye you cannot see, by feel, behind you. And it asks you to do all of it balanced on your feet, leaning and twisting, before you've hardly woken up. Reaching behind your back and holding your balance at the same time. Those happen to be the two things a body gets worse at the longer it lives. Not because anything is wrong with you. That is simply what shoulders and balance do over a life. So the very first thing I put on every single morning was asking my body to do the exact two things it had gotten worst at. That reaching and twisting and balancing was the thing that put me into the footboard of my own bed, and put a ninety-three-year-old woman in a rehab for eleven weeks. And all that time I had been blaming my own body for fighting me. The doctor took a picture of my rib, because a rib is what you can see on a picture. Nobody takes a picture of the thing you put on. Nobody ever thinks to look at the thing you put on. A tank with the bra built into it asks none of that of you. No hook. Nothing to reach behind you for. Nothing to line up blind. You step into it, or you pull it over your head, the same as any other top, and it is already holding you, and you are dressed. One step. That is the whole thing. I am not telling you this because I am a doctor. I am telling you what my husband and I read at our own kitchen table the night I came home with a cracked rib and finally told the truth. Hank found the cheap ones on the computer first. The ten-dollar ones with no name on them. And here is where forty years of sewing finally came in handy, because I took one look at the pictures and I knew. The "bra" in those cheap ones is a thin strip of elastic sewn flat into a shelf, and I can tell you exactly what that does, it goes wavy and useless after two washes and it holds up nothing. If I was going to trust a thing to hold me every day at my age, I wanted the one built like it was made to last, the one with real support sewn into the front, that keeps its shape, not the kind that just covers you up and calls itself a bra. That is the one Wanda's mother wore. Summet. Summet had a 30-day money-back guarantee. That is what settled it for me. If a thing doesn't do what it ought to in a month, I send it back and I get my money. That is a fair deal, and at 73, after the year I'd had, I was done gambling. The box came on a Thursday, while my rib was still healing. I put the first one on as gently as I could, and even moving like I was, I felt it. There was nothing to reach for. There was no hook. I stepped in and pulled it up and I was dressed, and I sat down on the edge of the bed and I cried, partly from the rib and partly because that is how easy it was supposed to have been the whole time. For the first couple of weeks, even with the rib, I kept reaching around behind my own back out of sixty years of habit and finding nothing there. I'd catch myself with my arms twisted up behind me hunting for a hook that wasn't there, and I'd laugh, very carefully, on account of the rib. By the time the rib had healed up, getting dressed had stopped being something I braced for. Day 30 or so, once I could move again, I sat back down at Bernadette and finished a quilt I'd started for Maddie and abandoned two years before, because I hadn't had the heart to fight my way into a day at the machine. A few days after that, my daughter drove in from Harrisburg to check on me and she stood in my kitchen and looked at me a good while and said, "Mom, you look like yourself again." The first Tuesday I felt up to it, I went back to the quilting circle I'd quit. Twenty years I'd gone, and a year I'd stayed away, and the women there hugged me like I'd come back from somewhere. In a way I had. I have been wearing Summet for a little over four months now, as I tell my granddaughter this so she can type it. I have not fought a clasp in four months. I have not braced for a single morning. Hank told me last week I sing in the kitchen again, which I hadn't noticed I'd stopped. I got my friend Bev from the quilting circle to try them, because I had a feeling she was fighting the same fight and saying nothing, same as I had. She's 70. She's been wearing them nine weeks. She told me last Tuesday she hadn't dreaded a morning in over a month, which from Bev is the next thing to a hallelujah. I have seen Wanda twice more at that pharmacy, and the second time I brought her a little zippered pouch I'd sewn, because I didn't know how else to thank a stranger for what she did. She wouldn't hardly take it. She told me her mother just turned ninety-seven and got dressed standing up on her birthday morning, and the two of us stood there in the cough-drop aisle and got teary, two grown women, over a tank top. If you are a woman my age, and you have been telling yourself that the fight to get dressed of a morning, the dread of it, is just a part of getting old, I am here to tell you it might not be. It might be one layer deeper than where the doctor knows to look. It might be the very first thing you put on every morning that not one soul ever thinks to look at. I am not a woman who puts things on Facebook. My granddaughter is typing this out for me as I say it, because I never learned how and she's better at it anyway. But I made a promise to a woman named Wanda in a row of plastic chairs that if Summet did for me half of what it did for her mother, I would tell at least one other woman what she told me. So this is me telling you. If you want to try it, Summet has a 30-day money-back guarantee. You are not gambling. If it does nothing for you, you send it back. If it does what it did for me, you'll be the one telling some other woman six months from now. P.S. The footboard of that bed. I think about that morning every single day. I think about the sound my own chest made, and how long I sat on that floor alone, and how close I came to it being a hip instead of a rib, and a rehab instead of a week of aspirin. I will not take for granted getting dressed standing up ever again. P.P.S. The 30-day money-back guarantee is what got me to do it. I am not a woman who throws money around, ask anybody who ever paid me for a pair of slacks. The guarantee was the difference between thinking about it and actually doing it. Summet is the only one I found that gives you back every dollar, no restocking, no questions, if it isn't what you came for. I have respect for an outfit that stands behind its work, because I stood behind mine for forty years. P.P.P.S. Wanda and I are friends now. She is coming to my quilting circle next Tuesday as my guest, and she is bringing her mother, who is ninety-seven and gets dressed standing up every single morning, and who I cannot wait to meet. P.P.P.P.S. To the woman reading this who shut the bathroom door this morning so nobody would see her fight her way into her clothes, who's got a bruise or worse she's lied about, who quit the thing she used to love because she couldn't face the morning it took. You do not have to keep fighting it behind that door. Tell somebody the truth. Don't wait for the footboard. 👉 https://getsummet.com/products/sculpt-tank-with-built-in-bra