Too Tall

That's me on the first day of 4th grade. Nine years old. Tall and skinny.

By the next year, 5th grade, I was 5'-8" tall and towered over my teacher, and all of my classmates.

"Stand up straight!" was my mother's constant admonishment. Desperately, I slouched through my adolescence, trying to disguise the reality of my eventual 5'-11" frame. The gangliness was only emphasized by the fact that, until the birth of my second child, I only barely cleared 120 pounds most of the time. No one talked about anorexia in those years...

My arms hung from coat sleeves, and I never owned any pair of pants that weren't "high water" pants.

I was the walking, talking, living incarnation of "Too Tall Jones."

Today, I've mostly come to terms with my height. The world has gotten taller around me. Kids today grow taller than they did when I was young.

Still, the boys at school use me as one of the benchmarks by which they measure their stature: "taller than Ms. D." is a milestone on the way to manhood...

My "swan" moniker came about in large part BECAUSE of that height, and I wear it proudly. Mostly.

But...

Sometimes it is so clear that the world is made for those women who are NOT too tall... NOT 5'-11" tall. The world is largely made with the built in assumption that real women are small, petite, short (or at least shorter than me) -- maybe 5'-5" or 5'-6" tall. It gets driven home, for me these days, when I try to fold my long limbs and long torso, into the stocks...

He woke up this morning having fantasized all night about putting "people" into the stocks and whipping them with the rubber whip. Just the mention of it took my breath away in my still sleepy state. But I settled my breathing and calmed the butterflies and walked over to the stocks with quiet resolve.

Then the real battle began. I just fucking don't fit. Too tall!!! No matter how I bend, twist, wriggle, squirm, it is a struggle just to get into the thing. My head goes through the hole and my wrists fit into the openings as do my ankles. It is just that once there, there is no place to put all the extra length in between -- too much body, too much leg... I tilt it at an odd angle, and then I can barely breathe, and it stretches my neck and strains my shoulders and wrenches my hips and my knees. The struggle with the wood is hideous. I can't relax into the restraint because I am struggling just to stay alive -- I am TOO DAMN TALL!!!

Damn! Damn! and double Damn!!!

No way to be graceful. No way to be lovely. No way to bend far enough. Only surgical removal of about 5 or 6 inches would remedy this "long-coming".

I breathed and gasped my way through part of the whipping, but I know He cut it way shorter than He wanted to. I felt a failure and a mess and a disappointment. I feel hideously frustrated because I simply do not fit -- not there and not on the bench. The only place I fit is on the frame that I designed for my height, and it is so hard to set up that we seldom use it.

Sigh...

Too tall to fit anywhere.

swan