I Thought I’d Be Taller By Now
By Sabine Wilson-Patrick
Photography by Elizabeth Hunt
I was going to be a prima ballerina, I was going to be a concert violinist, or a world-renowned painter, or a netball star. I was going to be 5’9. The growth chart at my paediatrician’s office was a faulty tool of divination. At the time, it seemed so professional. So certain. I recall a thrill as she centred the metal rule of the scales, using the parting of my hair as a road map. My mother parted my hair every other morning and asked if I wanted 2, 3 or 4 plaits. I always wanted two. They bounded around my head like a Newton’s cradle while I waited for my doctor to tell me if I was still on track to be model height.
Saturday morning cartoons were a backdrop for my bright future. I took a fistful of popsicle sticks and borrowed my father’s glue gun and created tiny scale houses for my Polly Pockets. They had varied ambitions: I built a ranch-style house for the Polly Pockets that aspired to have families and bake casseroles, I constructed a garage for my Polly Pockets that drove tiny candy-coloured SUVs, I made a barn with a silo for my Polly Pockets that wanted to slaughter pigs. I was going to be an architect; my mother thought I was going to be an architect. The future according to my mother seemed very simple. You decided what you were going to be and it would be bestowed upon you (in popsicle stick form). I didn’t stick with my popsicle constructing business for long enough to build myself a taller body. I would have accepted residual limbs held together by hot melted plastic. I didn’t stick with the violin long enough to become a virtuoso. But I think even if I still played now, I wouldn’t have gone to Julliard and played in the Welsh National Opera. At the most, I would have just delighted Tinder dates with my baroque party trick.
The sting of parental disappointment never came; I didn’t even get so much as a mosquito bite. One afternoon my mother informed me that some people just don’t have blood mosquitoes find tasty. I had gone from prima ballerina to unpalatable for bugs. From potentially 5’9 to 5’5 with fused bones. I was past the age at which everything I did was a premonition. I was fully grown and shorter than I should have been.
I took joy in my attempts to gain a few more inches. I learned that being fully grown did not mean you were bankrupt of all potential, it just had to be placed on you by somebody who didn’t love you. I needed faith placed in me by strangers; competition judges and men on the street who thought I had a nice singing voice and university application committees. My paediatrician's notes on my height and weight and blood type didn’t paint a crystal clear picture of the woman I was expected to be, but my mother filled in the gaps. There are photographs of me at first recitals and bent over my tiny little houses. My fingers look dextrous and capable.
At 21, 5 '5, I go to the Hobbycraft to buy popsicle sticks and a glue gun in hot pink. The houses are now remarkably smaller because I don’t have to fit dolls inside of them. I stick together a church that sits in the palm of my hand and when my mother asks, “What makes it a church?” I reply “It is a church because I said so”. She doesn’t understand my logic. Neither did I. If the logic followed I would be tall and thin and bright and living inside a future she imagined for me. A great big manor house in Somerset, made and paid for with popsicle sticks.
“Do you think I have potential?” She doesn’t understand why I feel the need to ask. I question how much of my early childhood I had falsified to tell myself I had failed at everything. I had done it remarkably early, before I even really called myself a woman. I questioned if a whole future unfurled in front of me every time I caught a netball before it slipped through the goal and if I had just imagined this fantom-doctor that told me I would be very tall in my 20s. I think my mother was just excited at the idea of me growing up, and the acute potential of my adulthood. Maybe I was going to be a prima ballerina, maybe I would be a concert violinist, maybe I would be 5’9. Or maybe I would just smoke in my bed even though it’s bad for the sheets, and call her everyday just to chat.
