The Child Is Growing

by Jaime Fountaine

The child is growing. He finished first grade with a growth spurt, losing a tooth, gaining two inches. His shoes were tight enough that he got his new sneakers for second-grade months early. Maybe it was the sun and water of summer—like a plant between sidewalk cracks, he was bursting out of everything by September.

At first—and I’m not proud of this—I thought I had finally figured out how to live in my body, that I had managed to crack the code that would allow me to control it without enormous effort, that walking and yoga and vegetables had finally counteracted genetics and after dinner potato chips. It’s embarrassing. I wanted to be above it, but I was also a tiny bit thrilled. People at the office started to notice. “You’re so skinny! Have you been working out?” All that dumb, hateful shit that echoes between your flesh and bones. And I guess I was, but no more than usual. Maybe it was the stress of being alive today? A reward for making it to my forties? Gravity?

I didn’t think too hard about it. Work was busy and I had a lot going on personally. That’s one of those things you can say honestly while still being dishonest with yourself and others. It could mean anything. I could have interrogated this. I could have kept a food diary, seen a doctor. But I felt fine and I wasn’t ready to learn something new about myself. My gynecologist said everything looked good in April, wasn’t that enough?

But then my shoes were too big. All the money I’d spent, all the effort to find the best deal, lost as I shrunk from a European 37 to an American 6. I tried thicker socks, but it looked terrible and I slid around like a cartoon. I googled “feet shrinking -ai” and “feet shrinking reddit” and learned just enough about something called “Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease” to keep me from doing deeper research.

I found an article with a headline about the author’s feet getting smaller, but the foot stuff was behind a paywall, which wasn’t in my budget for this particular concern. I saw articles about bra sizing, which wasn’t relevant to my foot problem. I got a lot of ads for hideous sneakers. I got ads for bras for people with very small breasts. I hid the ads; I marked them irrelevant. I got ads for people with very large breasts. I hid the ads; I marked them irrelevant. The algorithm does not know my bra size. I no longer know my bra size.

The rest of my ads are for perimenopause, a magical time in a woman’s life that will bloat her belly, cloud her brain, and shrink her bones. There are supplements and goos available to fight the slow march toward death at a variety of price points. Maybe that’s all this is—a new, hilarious type of bone loss.

When a person loses weight, they usually lose it everywhere. What was happening to me was different. I never gained edges. I stayed round. My clothes were bigger, but my body looked the same to me. Even though I seemed to be shrinking, I maintained the same proportions. There were upsides to this. I didn’t appear deflated, nothing new was sagging. I remained the occasionally frustrating, occasionally fetching arrangement of circles I’d always been.

I’ve had good fortune with my body. I am relatively healthy and have a high pain tolerance. I still have most of my teeth and have never knowingly broken a bone, though my collarbone is wonky on the right side from a bike accident in my twenties. It doesn’t count if you never had an x-ray. 

I have friends who have been through so much and continue to go through it every day. My periods have always been light and relatively painless, unless you consider the two days of the month where I feel like the ugliest woman in the world, which I don’t. My joints and cartilage cooperate. My bones stacked themselves correctly without intervention. I am anxious, certainly, but in the way that means I tidy my house or sleep poorly when I’m nervous and not in a way that significantly disrupts my life. I have always been able to work, even under my worst circumstances. My childhood was bad, but no one hit me. I have been very lucky so far. It’s probably just my time to suffer a little.

My mother had five siblings, and she was tied for shortest with the next-oldest sister. I haven’t spoken to my mother in over twenty years. Last I saw her, I was a breath taller. I wonder if that would be the case now that I’m shrinking. I don’t miss her, but I wonder what she looks like now. The woman in my stress dreams is younger than I am now.

I was never tall. I reached my full adult height in eighth grade. Sometimes I trick people with my posture, but only until they stand me next to someone five foot five. My younger brother surpassed me when he was ten. It has since become a rite of passage for the children of my family. I’m the second oldest of nine cousins and all but one of them are taller. The youngest cousin is only eight. He encroaches.

At the boardwalk amusement park, I waited with the child while his brother and sister went on a scarier ride. We stood by the merry-go-round—not the good one, the one for babies—while he told me about what he’d do when he got bigger. He was going to go on all the scariest rides with his brother for sure.

My nephew is four and already hits above my waist. My brother, who is tall, married a tall and beautiful woman. When she was pregnant with their first, he said, “We’re going to find out how big we get when you feed us.” So far, pretty big! He and his little sister Facetime me at dinner, where they each try to tell me the plot of a different Disney movie over the other.

“Aunt Jaime, can I tell you something?” They were promised a cookie, which they can have once they eat a little bit more of their dinner. I take the phone outside to see if the neighborhood cat wants to say “hello,” but he has no phone etiquette. My niece doesn’t either. She takes her shirt off and hangs up the phone while I blow kisses. It won’t be long before they approach me like my cousins and their kids have, with a flat palm sat on the tops of their heads, ready to measure. 

I could barely reach the second shelf in my lowest cabinets when I moved into this house, so I already had a stepstool, but it’s gotten ridiculous. I had to get a second one for upstairs so I could get to the shelf in my closet, even though it’s mostly stacked with things for which I don’t have a better place. It’s impossible to arrange all the things I need within my own reach now. Before every shower, I lug it inside the bathroom so I can reach the Q-Tips and feel the satisfaction of disobeying the plainly stated rules, hear the whisps of cotton approach my tender ear drum. I balance the stepstool on the nubby Ikea rug, so it won’t slide around while I check myself in the mirror. I see her. She looks the same.  

According to legend, my grandmother waited eleven years to get a broken foot checked out. It still took her a couple more decades before switching to sneakers. There is strength in that. My grandfather learned, at the hospital for many bee stings, that his heart had been pumping blood at 25 percent of intended capacity. He’d had at least two unaddressed heart attacks. There is also worry. I was raised by people who believed they could weather anything and did, but mostly because of what they were willing to allow. 

I’ve worried over the years that my ability to compartmentalize is going to backfire on me, that all the things I filed away to process later will grow into a tumor or start to rot me from inside. I let myself cry in the privacy of the shower, or when I take a walk by the river in my largest sunglasses. I’ll have a podcast on, so I’m not completely alone with my thoughts, and it’s usually only a few tears blooming hot against the backs of my eyeballs, wiped away before they can fully descend a cheekbone. I’m a modern woman. I can feel despair and reassess the OJ Simpson trial at the same time.

On good days, I’m shrinking. On bad ones, I’m disappearing. One is whimsical, matter of fact, a funny little anecdote. The other is a metaphor, a portent, even Kafkaesque. Years ago, my brother, inclined toward making bombastic speeches when he’s drunk, confused Kafka for Nietzsche and declared, “We are Kafka’s Supermen!” “Yes,” I said. “Bugs.”

A true friend is someone who will accompany you to Claire’s in your forties. I cannot control my height, but I can control my ears. I first got them pierced at four, two tiny gold hearts. Over the years, I would let them close up and then reopen them, either by jamming an earring through, or asking my mother to re-pierce them with a hat pin. The woman at Claire’s is horrified as I explain that she had lots of practice, because she’d do it in the locker room in high school for a Diet Coke and a cup of ice. She finds the ghost of the second hole in my right ear that I got in middle school and picks a spot on the left one. It hurts even less than I remember.

I had a boss who, upon reaching fifty, decided to get the zodiac sign tattoo from his misspent youth transformed into something more meaningful. It was a recurring appointment on his calendar that couldn’t be moved and wasn’t anyone else’s business. When the half-sleeve was complete, he was excited to show me, as a reward for keeping the secret. He peeled back one sleeve of his dress shirt to show me a medium well-rendered picture of trees in autumn, framing a path that, as you can guess, diverged. This was around the same time his now ex-wife started sending Outlook invitations for family obligations. 

I wish I had such a tidy means by which to assert my tenuous control of the narrative, but the shampoo I like seems to be discontinued. I beg the comment box to bring it back. “Please,” I type, “don’t make me deal with this on top of everything else that’s going on.”

Everything I accomplish with my kitchen tongs is a victory. I pull a bag of nutritional yeast off the top shelf. I replace it. I’ve only lost one mug—it wasn’t a favorite. When the stepstool doesn’t cut it, I climb onto the counter like I did as a child. I am less afraid of the infrastructure of the kitchen crumbling underneath me than I used to be, but now, from any height, I imagine the fall. I read tips from a stuntwoman in AARP Magazine: protect your head and land on the meat. I meditate on that as I pull a ceramic baking dish down, dip low enough to place it on the counter and dismount, my meat safe on the ground for now.

When I was a small child, both in age and size, I walked almost exclusively on my toes. It made me taller and, I imagined, more glamorous. I was very interested in glamour then. Now I practice toe raises in my sweatpants, so I can keep my balance in old age. I’m making dinner, I’m exercising, I’m scrolling. I rise up on my toes to stir, scrape the pot as I land on my heels. I rise up as I open the app, tap the photos twice. My aunt posts a throwback to her family’s summer trip to the beach. I land, start to type out a comment about how much fun I had the day I joined them. I can picture it: my youngest cousin lit by carnival light as the hits of the ’80s, ’90s, and today mix with shouts and the machine sounds of the rides, the damp ocean air cool enough to warrant a sweatshirt and curl your hair.

“I’m going to get bigger,” the child said. “And as I get bigger, you’ll get smaller. Smaller and smaller! Until I can throw you in the trash!” He laughed then, and so did I.

Jaime Fountaine was raised by “wolves.” She lives in Philadelphia.