I was 5’5” in fifth grade and a Long Island transplant from Ohio who would sometimes be mistaken for the teacher’s aide in our classroom.  The only thing worse would have been saying “pop” to a room filled with soda drinkers, but I would give up my favorite tennis shoes to avoid that embarrassment.  On the first day of school, my legs did not fit easily under the tiny desk, but I was too afraid to mention it to my very strict teacher.  So, I swallowed my pain, shoved myself in and pressed the tops of my legs into the metal underbelly of the desk until lunchtime, when the red marks would have a chance to return to their milky white.  I went home crying that I was never going back and after a phone call from my mom that I would, to this day have loved to hear, my teacher walked me to the sixth grade wing the next morning to choose a taller desk.  While this was a win for my pale leg flesh, I wasn’t sure it was the lesser of the two social evils that I wanted.  My now too tall desk demanded the attention that I was trying to avoid.  I couldn’t even sit without being noticed.  I suddenly would have done anything to have my desk match the other 19 in the room.  Side by side, they stood together symmetrically while my desk towered over them like the inches-high, brightly colored hair of a troll doll.  I pulled my legs up off the ground to touch the cool metal, assuring myself it was not as bad as I remembered, attempting to swing my feet off the ground like the perfectly tiny girl next to me.  Back and forth, carefree.  Mine were anything but carefree.  My feet barely grazed the bluish brown carpet one time before they skidded back on the ground with a thud that incriminated my underdeveloped ab muscles.

When I was in first or second grade, I ran on our church track team and was indirectly but overtly harassed before every meet by the grown men that fathered my opponents.  They shouted, arms slung over the fence, as if being held back from attacking.  Demanded to see my birth certificate before every race.  I was too tall, looked too old and worst of all, usually won.  They hated me, I told myself.  My dad, proud of having anything to do with creating someone so revered, got in the habit of carrying a copy in his back pocket.  We have all spent time slung over the proverbial fence.  Shouting about someone who is too much to our detriment.  Back then, I did not have the perspective (or self-awareness) to know this.  That I would eventually do it too.  I just assumed that no one else had ever made anyone so angry.  That it was my fault that they were upset.  I should have been smaller.  More accommodating.  We are all guilty of accusing someone of something around which we have no perspective.  Like when I was a perfect parent before I had kids.   

Maybe someone is cheating and putting their 8-year-old in the 6-year-old league, but exceptions are rarely the rule.  And for me, at 6-years-old, those dads left a mark.  You shouldn’t be here, they said.  Then, suddenly, I would win and I was celebrated.  My teammates and coaches most definitely wanted me around.  Those cheers made a confusing and convincing counter argument.  Some say the only way out is through.  But that sweaty handful of ribbons at the end of the meet and the cheers around me told me otherwise.  The only way out for me, was blue.         

I didn’t play my first game of basketball, the sport I ended up playing in college, until I was 12 years old.  I was at least 5’8” at the time and joined my sister’s summer league game, where all the girls were two years older than me, but still much shorter.  Apparently, no one minded if I played up.  I remember feeling very aware that everyone expected me to know what to do, but I actually had no idea whatsoever what to do.  Like walking into a really fancy restaurant and looking down at all the forks and spoons and forgetting how to eat.  Everyone was shouting instructions at me and every term meant less to me than the one before it.  Decades later, when my daughters played in their first basketball game, their overly intense coach shouted “everyone find your man!”  Eight little girls stopped and looked right up at him.  They found their man.  I laughed because I knew exactly how those little girls felt.  Dude.  You are their man.  You were so easy to find.  Stop yelling.  Anyway, just before the warning buzzer sounded to start my first game, the coach came up to me and said, “you’re tall.  Stand under the basket and when the other team misses a shot, jump up and grab the ball and pass it to the point guard.”  The words “point guard” hung in the air as a blank nothingness formed over my head.  Then I noticed that he was holding on to the arm of the shortest girl near me.  The space filled in with a simple check list.  Jump up, get the ball, pass to the shorty.  Aye, aye, coach.  I remember nothing about the score or overall specifics of the game.  But I do remember getting a lot of rebounds.  A lot, a lot.  As I started grabbing more, I kept the ball high over my head (something that the people in the stands seemed extremely concerned about me doing).  Then I would look for the short girl.  She must have played every minute that I did, because hers is the only face seared into my brain.  Over and over and over I can see her, standing unguarded with arms and hands outstretched toward me, yelling, “pass me the ball, I’m open!”  Confident that I had already achieved the hardest part of my three-tiered check list, I would pull the ball back behind my head slightly, to gain momentum and propel it forward toward her hands like a soccer ball inbound pass.  Every time, without fail, I would pass it to the other team.  Even with a LeBron James’ amount of basketball knowledge you couldn’t call it a steal.  I passed it to them. Every. Single. Time.  In looking for my point guard, I had failed to “see the defense”.  There was a lot of basketball strategy that I would have benefitted from knowing.  No one mentioned that I had to make sure that I didn’t pass the ball to the other team.  In fairness, I almost never remind people to see things. 

Except my children.  And my husband.

In going up to get the ball and looking for my point guard, I missed the sea of defenders and teammates between me and her.  I glossed over the need to get around them, to stay patient, to avoid.  I was a looping gif.  Jump, catch, throw, turnover.  The memory of this game is a fuzzy blur of people screaming in slow motion, just as I let go of the ball into the hands of the other team.  We probably lost.  I can’t imagine how we could have won.  I was standing under their basket, handing them back the ball.

Seventh grade began in the fall and subsequently, a five-year stretch of walking in front of people who would whisper, “look how tall she is!” all the live long day.  In fairness, I was 6’ tall by the time I hit eighth grade.  Walking around hallways with hundreds of peers wasn’t exactly as high on my list of priorities as, say, anonymity, invisibility and a chair to sit in.  It never relented.  And I remained too shy/embarrassed/mortified to turn around and say any number of the witty retorts I had floating around my head.  As I explain to my daughters, if you lined up 100 women to display our average height, I would be the 100^th in line.  If stress is wishing something were different than it is, then whoever figured that out was probably in middle school at the time. 

By force and determination, I played every sport I could and actually started learning the rules and the terms and the strategy.  Turns out sports are a lot more fun when you know what to do.  Size and strength make it all a lot more fun too.  The silent apologies for my size I would make off the court and the field my entire life would disappear when the whistle blew.  I started shaking off the desire to perform for other people to drown out the naysayers.  I felt more myself when I was playing and never had a single teammate make fun of my size.  When you find your people, you feel it.  I once played one-on-one soccer in my front yard with a friend for an entire afternoon.  I could not wait for blistering hot summer league basketball games and the ritualistic stops at 7-11 for ice cold cherry Slurpees afterward.  I loved making warm up tapes and that feeling of knowing where my teammates would be before they got there.  I can still feel the crack of the bat that created the grand slam hit or the block that ended the volleyball game against our biggest rival.  They are the feelings I recall whenever I watch an iconic movie about sports, like Rudy or Miracle or Air Bud.

Having twin, twelve-year-old girls is an ironic reversal of my headspace back then that is not lost on me.  At 5-years-old one asked me if she would grow “too high”.  When I asked her what she meant, she replied, “like you.  Because I’m afraid of heights.”  Listen, I get it.  I am faced weekly with tear streamed faces, feeling the pain of being taller, stronger, bigger than their friends.  I watch as they poke and prod their skin and features, wishing they were smaller, dainty, petite.  I listen and understand, sharing my story, trying not to scream “you are at least 5 inches shorter than I was at your age!” I am not always as over it as I want to be. 

Without thinking, I compare their bodies to my own, explaining how similar we are.  I ask them to think of me, standing next to all of my friends now and if they notice how different we look.  Then I ask if I am too big or too much.  They get so upset when I suggest this.  Why is it easier to love someone else for what they are but not ourselves?

I feel the same urgent need that my own mom did when she told me to “just be confident”.  I hate seeing them wounded by something totally and completely out of their control.  I understand why she would say that everyone was just jealous.  Enough people have told me they would rather be tall than short to know that she was at least partly right.  But then I give them what I always needed.  I look them dead in the eye and say, “honestly, sometimes it just sucks to be the biggest.”  And for a moment, we all relax.