Lingerie department is mission of faith for working mom

Astrid Bernabe sells bras at the Dillard’s in Sanford.

Astrid Bernabe was in a posh Dillard’s fitting room talking about church with her arms full of bras when she heard her customer sniffle.

It wasn’t unusual for her to soothe her half-naked customers worried about their jiggly arms or crooked nipples. She’d often spend hours hawking lingerie to insecure women in fitting rooms who posed endlessly in the mirror trying to feel better about themselves.

She turned around to face the woman, a singer who’d come in looking for a shapely way to look good in her Christmas dress.

Tears welled in the woman’s eyes as she sat in the garments Astrid had just suggested – a red bra and pair of Spanx.

“God is so amazing,” the woman said.

Astrid thought she’d said something wrong.

“Yes,” she said, puzzled. “Um. Yes he is.”

The tears gushed as the woman asked more about Astrid’s church and shared doubts about her own Christian faith. Her husband of 20 years didn’t share her beliefs and the marriage was difficult. Astrid listened, hugged the nearly-naked woman and did the first thing that came to her – she prayed.

The spiritual encounter in the midst of a bra-fitting was not the first of its kind for the 26-year-old lingerie sales manager. On any given day she she’s in three-inch heels fetching armloads of garments from the sales floor for her shoppers. With a pink tape measure in hand, she spends hours not only sizing womens’ busts but lovingly assuring them their bodies are beautiful.

“They tell me what they think is wrong with them,” she said, adding that most of her customers come in with fake desires to look like super-models.

“I can’t make you that,” she tells them. “But I can make you feel good about yourself.”

Astrid, a peppy mother of two young boys, is the breadwinner for her small family. She was a single mother for several years and survived an emotionally abusive relationship in her early 20s. The experiences, she says, are what motivate her to love the strangers she meets in the dressing rooms. When they point at their bulging bellies, flat chests or hips widened by childbirth she reminds them one of her profound personal truths.

“No matter what, you’re always going to have an issue with yourself and it sucks,” she said.

Astrid later married the father of her second child, but the marriage isn’t easy. Her husband, a talented artist, cares for their two children while she works six days a week, budgets like a tightwad and aspires to go to college. Most months are tough. To make ends meet she doesn’t keep a cell phone and tracks every penny. Sometimes she doesn’t have money for groceries, but instead relies on the unseen power of her faith to provide. Miraculously – often through random acts of kindness – it always does.

Astrid dreams about being a missionary, but believes her work in the Dillard’s fitting room goes beyond selling the perfect garment.
She’s seem the physical scars of a breast cancer survivor, gotten marital-sex advice from an aged customer and soothed a crying woman in Spanx. But no amount of cotton, wire or padding will ever really make a woman truly feel beautiful, she thinks. The answer lies instead in each affirming their own worth.

“Every woman has her own image of beauty,” she said.

Through it all, Astrid believes that the lingerie fitting rooms are her real-life mission field, one filled with silky garments and plastic hangers. Often it reeks of self-loathing and bitterness that comes from the women who refuse appreciate their bodies. Her position gives her a window as a silent observer of the female psyche with all of its complications, self-loathing and hurt. She believes it’s her mission to love all of the women who come to her naked, fearful and vulnerable. God’s placed her in the rooms to soothe, comfort and be a word of encouragement, she says. And in doing so, she not only heals the women, but also watches the scars from her own painful womanhood fade.

“We all need a person in our lives,” she said. “Even if it’s the sales chick at Dillard’s.”