It Was A Small World

The sky is grey, I spent yesterday’s public holiday doing not much at all, and I have nothing to blog about.  Time for an updated re-post.

I have had an identity crisis.  Spud complained that he is still shorter than me – we do the back-to-back thing every day, he being the teenage equivalent of Snow White’s stepmother: Measure, Measure in Dad’s Hand, when’ll I be tallest in the land?

The Hub measured him and found him to be 5′ tall.  Now this is weird because I am also 5′ small, yet I am two inches taller than Spud.

I have always been 5′ small, and rather like it.  Think of Kylie Minogue and you get the idea of how dainty I am.  Or was, thirty years ago.  Now I’m 5′ wide as well: a sort of Kylie-squared.

Kylie

Me

Can you see the likeness?

It transpires I am not 5′ small after all, despite what it says in my passport.  The tape measure proves it: I am 5’2″.   When I had my recent well-woman check, the nurse practitioner proved it, too.

No more standing on the third step up to the back garden that backed onto my childhood back garden to kiss 6′ tall boyfriends for me…though the Hub might have something to say about that, anyway; so perhaps it’s just as well.

My problem is that I have always considered myself to be a certain height and now I find that something I have always believed – known – about myself is simply not true.  I have made a false declaration on my passport!  The Police could take me away in the night and electrocute my testicles with passion fruit (sorry if that doesn’t make sense; I had a sleepless night worrying about it).

Imagine if you are a girl and you have always been a girl and it says on your passport that you are a girl and then somebody measures you against your child one day – a child that you lovingly carried, birthed, reared and gained weight for, the miserable little turncoat – and they tell you that, oops, it’s a mistake and you are actually a boy.  I think you’d be as hysterical as I am right now, wouldn’t you?

My image of myself as diminutive has been irrevocably altered – I can no longer ask strangers in the supermarket to pass me the tofu* on the top shelf; they’ll just laugh and tell me to ‘Get it yourself, Lofty.’

*If it is true that I am tall then it is true that I am a healthy eater as well.

The Hub obviously didn’t think this through when he told me the alleged truth about myself.  He likes dainty women, which is why bundled me into a wedding carriage all those years ago.  He was six inches taller than me then: tall enough to make me feel protected but not so tall that I needed to wear a neck brace after canoodling with him.  We are going to have to re-think our whole relationship now that I am a giant.

He tried to soothe my understandable fury by blaming my Dad, who would have been the one to measure me all those years ago.  It did calm me down because my Dad was a bit dopey (where do you think I get it from?) and it is a plausible theory.  BUT – and it is a big but, as you can see – I have just remembered that my Dad didn’t measure me for that first passport because he was in South Africa at the time.  So now I am doubly angry at the Hub – he shattered my self-esteem and besmirched the good name of the best Dad who ever lived.  That’s a good enough excuse to throw something at him, I think.  Excuse me a moment…

…that feels better.

Spud said I should look on the bright side: I am no longer a midget.  I should be grateful for small mercies.