Happy Short Girl Appreciation Day To Me

December 21 is Short Girl Appreciation Day. I am a short girl—5’1” in my stocking feet. So I hope to be appreciated today.

In Catholic school, we frequently lined up by height. I was always one of the shortest girls in my class in school. Of course, I was a year younger than most of the kids, so that was part of the problem. I specifically recall being the third shortest girl in my First Communion procession in second grade, and second or third in line for the Confirmation procession in sixth grade. So I was never the very shortest. Just short.

Some short girls were good at athletics, but I was not one of them. So although I was near the front of the line in processions, I was near the end when being chosen for sports teams.

As an adult, being short also made my life more difficult. During my lawyering days, I can’t count the times that other attorneys talked across the top of my head. It was hard to get people to listen to me when I was speaking to their foulard ties.

I was always glad once we got seated around the conference table. But then my feet didn’t touch the floor. I had to decide whether to sit on the front edge of my chair or curl one leg underneath me in a decidedly unprofessional posture. In my own office, I used foot rests.

And finding lawyerly clothes that fit was also a problem. Only a few stores carried petite sizes. Often those clothes were too frilly. Pants and skirts generally had to be re-hemmed. Which, of course, cost money—unlike alterations in the Men’s Department. I wore heels every day of my corporate life, except for when I was on crutches with a broken foot.

When I became a mother, I was passed up by both my children when they turned eleven. I can still remember my son standing next to me and pointedly looking down at me, relishing his new stature. I had to find ways other than height to remain an authority figure. A good glare helped.

My husband and both children hid things from me simply by putting them on top of the refrigerator. I could never reach anything on the top shelves of the kitchen cupboards without a stepladder. (In our new home with higher ceilings, that now translates to the top two shelves.) I was forever asking for a tall person—any tall person—to help me get the seldom used dishes down.

I also have to find tall people in the grocery store, where the items I want are invariably on the top shelf. Most tall people seem willing to help in exchange for a smile.

Being short also lends itself to a certain myopia. Not only can I not see on top of the refrigerator or reach the upper shelves, but I don’t even think about the higher hazards in life. My 6’3” husband bangs his head on the corner of the stove hood—a problem I did not anticipate when designing our kitchen with the cabinetmaker. We had the foresight to round the corners on the kitchen counters, so my hips are less likely to bruise when I careen into them, but we did not think about rounding the corners on the stove hood.

I came by my shortness honestly. My dad was of about average height. So was his mother, and his father was actually relatively tall. But my mother was 5 foot, 1 and a half inches. She sometimes claimed “five foot two, eyes of blue,” but that was stretching it. Her mother was about five foot two, but not much more. My mother described her paternal grandfather to me as “a little Scots man who danced a jig with a pillow on his head,” so I guess the shortness in the family came from him.

My mother used her extra half inch of height over mine to lord it over me on occasion, though in the end she shrunk until she was definitely shorter than I am. I don’t think I’ve started shrinking yet. It will come, most likely. Unless I do more yoga.

So find the shortest girl you know today and appreciate her. She deserves it for putting up with a world that 364 days of the year prefers tall people.