Have you seen me? Where am I? My compass is broken. My GPS is playing tricks on me, my navigator is asleep on the job and the blips on my radar are all illusions. I am lost in space. There is a tiny dot in the infinite universe that is planet Earth, and I am a tiny dot on Earth. I am small and I feel even smaller. There are phases of the moon and I am in a dark, small and dry phase. For the last two weeks I have tried to write a blog post, but my words have been a mirage in the desert, disappearing the closer I get to them. To be without words scares me to death! How can I call out for help?
When I was a young woman I wanted to be petite, girly, tiny and beautiful and what I got instead was 5’6”of “big-boned” Iowa farm girl, like my aunts on my Dad’s side. Women like me were far from petite and I was recruited to throw the shot put my senior year. I went to practice a few times, smoked some cigarettes after practice and decided that being strong was not nearly as lucrative as being pretty and flirty. Young men were not attracted to big women. It was several years before I whittled my body down to “size” and men began to notice me. I was smaller, but I was more powerful in the arena of dating and romance. Small was good, big was bad, but vice versa for a man! I remember those ads in the back of magazines from long ago for the Charles Atlas bodybuilding course. The “before”picture was a skinny guy who got sand kicked in his face, the “after” was the guy on Brawny paper towels. Big is better, a lot better.
“How far along are you? The standard question put to pregnant women everywhere. When I said I was 6 months I heard, “You look too small to be six months along.” I thought I was Moby Danita and I was “small”! Being pregnant is filling a tiny uterus until it feels so big it will burst. After giving birth the uterus becomes small again and what is left to hold is a tiny baby. Of course baby grows bigger and bigger…. while Momma shrinks as she ages. On the other hand, noses and ears seem bigger with age.
Big bucks is good and so is a small waist. A big head and a small mind is pretty common these days. It’s all relative: big, bigger, biggest and small, smaller, smallest. I keep waiting for the “just right”designation from Goldilocks. My current state of feeling small might mean that I recognize that I am not the center of the universe and have acquired some measure of humility. I am a tiny dot on planet Earth but I can still use big words.
agingwrinklesandwondersdot.com 