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Guest Post - She's Putting on Her Big Girl Panties
Today's guest post is by blogger Mutt Puppy, who writes here :) Enjoy!!
Hi everyone, I am Muttpuppy and I have a blog “Putting On My Big Girl Panties” that I write mainly about roller derby, the 1980’s and YouTube videos that perk my interest. Lucy asked if I would do a guest post, so I wrote one. Hope you enjoy!
Midwest, Canada, Niagara Falls, Fort Ticonderoga and Maine (many stops in between). Three siblings of various ages (one of them me), two adult parents, one brown full sized van. It was summer vacation before I went into the seventh grade, two weeks on the road with my two brothers and parents. The trip was full of cheap motels, camping gear, random old friends the parents used to have something in common with, and historical landmarks. Things I will never forget? My “fife” from upstate New York, rain slickers are a must in Niagara, Baxter State Park has moss covered boulders, and my first lobster.
We had made it to Main and were spending the day hiking. My brothers we far ahead, one trying his hardest to ditch the parents, the other on full look out for any bit of fishing water to cast his bobber into. My parents made up the back of the trail, and I was independently exploring the surroundings on my own. Later in life, I found my journal from that trip, the last entry before blank pages, stated solely, ”I love the mountains and want to live in them always”, (which I have done my whole adult life). I am sure I was full of joy and excitement as I leapt through the trees and rocks. I remember hopping up onto one rock, primed to fly like a ballerina through the air to the next, when my foot slipped on some moss covering the rock under my foot, and down my body went into the middle of the large slick natural structure.
My parents rushed up the trail as I screamed in pain, it sounded like I was being murdered. My father had to silence my freak out with a quick slap across my face (the only time he has ever done anything of the sort). Immediately, I was calmer, but I couldn’t walk. My parents took their arms, crossed them in front of them and clasped hands making a cradle, and lifted me into the makeshift arm chair to carry me down to help. It was a slow, bumpy, and not at all pleasant trip to the bottom, but we made it to a cool, crisp body of water with a dock on it. It was there that my father left to get help and come back for my mother and me. I was instructed to go out into the water to help keep the swelling down, so I did what I was told. All of the sudden, my mom was telling me to get out of the cool mountain water, and she looked concerned, but wouldn’t tell me why, until I finally refused unless she told me. Leaches. Swimming up to me, long disgusting leeches. Hurt leg or not, I made it out in record time. Onto the dock, I sat down for a breather. Turning my head, I looked, and there she was, the mother who is supposed to love me, holding a stick, with a leach hanging on the end, in front of my face. More screaming, scooting down the dock, splitters in my butt, and her dangling the leech stick, closer and closer. As she is scarring me for life, here comes my father, a magical sight coming across the lake in a canoe to rescue me from my pain and torture. Mom takes the front, dad the back, me the floor in the middle. I prayed to God that that canoe didn’t tip and I drown. I wondered how much longer until I was back to the camp safe, when over to the right of the canoe, was no more than a moose, eating its lunch of grass in the water. My parents stop to watch. I grow furious because there is land in site and I am in pain! Take me to it? Nope, more moose watching. Gapers.
That day I had an x-ray, with no conclusive results. I was made a half cast of plaster and given bandages to hold it on. After traveling back across half the US with my leg elevated on the seat in front of me, I had a second x-ray, with inconclusive results. The instructions where to sleep with my leg free of the cast, elevated, until the third set of x-rays from a specialists. Ok. I did that. It was a beautiful sunny morning, and the house phone rang, awaking me from a beautiful sleep. No one picked it up the phone. It kept ringing, and no one got it, so I leapt like a ballerina out of my bed, landing perfectly, onto my hurt foot. Blackness. I passed out in pain. That day, I had the third set of x-rays. That day, I was given a full walking cast. That day, I found out I would never grow anymore. That was the day, my dreams of being taller than my mother, were shot down. I would never be 5’5” like I had always wanted; I would be 5’2”, forever. I also learned something else that day. When children grow, their growth plates are open. As the growth slows, the growth plates fuse together. In the legs the hips fuse first, the ankles last. Apparently, I had broken my growth plate in my ankle, so it was “open”, a confusing thing for a doctor to look at and see on a girl going into the seventh grade, who’s growth plate should technically not be fused together yet (hence, no more growth). The news of my lack of future height crushed me. I looked up to my doctor that day, with tears, asking him if there was anything I could do, or for him to tell me he had made a mistake. The Doctor told me that he could break my legs, insert rods, and then I would be taller, but in a wheel chair until I healed. Sign me up! I was ready; he could have taken me back and done it right then and there. My mother told me he was only joking (but he wasn’t). We still fight about it to this day. I have spent every day since then, wishing I could have had more leg, less torso. Just three more inches. It wasn’t until just recently that I learned something new. I have an advantage in the sport of roller derby because of my lower center of gravity, and someday, I will learn how to harness it. I have only been skating with my derby team for a few months, but that is all the time it has taken for me to come to terms with years of feeling inadequate with my size.
http://www.lucyindaskywithdiamonds.com/
