Nota Bene: THIS IS NOT Mary’s: Photography, Movement| Mary’s March Prompt

Everyone’s Legs Should Be The Exact Same Length

Just long enough to touch the ground, and yet…

This little story was inspired by Mary Chang Story Writer this morning. It was meant to follow on from her personal March prompt, ‘movement’.

Mary and I are on the same page on certain things, like exercising till we cark it, and so, after reading her March story, I thought I had the perfect response.

But there was a snag. There’s always a snag with me.

I hadn’t understood the rules

My post was too long in the first place…but there were a few other issues.

So Mary, I will get around to your March prompt, but the truth is I need to complete my Ph.D. on breaking open the complexity of your list of rules, first!

So anyway, and seriously, having finished my story, I then realized my word count was such that our Mary wouldn’t even open it.

What’s a girl to do?

I didn’t want to cut it down.

I decided instead, to repurpose it and make it an independent story about legs.

Let me explain.

I have two sisters.

They each dodged the bullet.

On my mother’s side, my Lilliputian grandfather bequeathed to a chosen few of his children and grandchildren, his shorter, stocky legs.

I was a lucky recipient.

Imagine that.

Of course my sister Catherine would suggest I have blown the shape and length of my legs out of all proportion.

She’s probably right.

But you know how it is, when you are young and everybody else has the perfect legs, yours become, by direct comparison, more imperfect.

Those mini-skirts have a lot to answer for, I tell you.

Still, that my legs do reach the floor, and do some amazing work, like walking, running, skipping, should be reason enough to celebrate, if only I could get my head out of that dark and sun-deprived space we all talk about.

My day of shame

I remember this as if it were yesterday, standing looking in the mirror and saying, “I hate my legs.”

My mother looked up from whatever she was doing and said, “I wouldn’t mind them.”

The earth stood still, ready for me to hop off to wherever I belonged.

The room was uncommonly quiet.

I was instantly ashamed.

If she’d meant to deliver a message, and I’m sure she had, it was done quietly, fairly, succinctly, and clearly.

I never ever complained about my legs again.

Marching into class

My mum used to talk about how they had to march into class.

She was the only one in class wearing a caliper, marching, marching, marching, the ultimate challenge she would never have been able to deliver on.

I read this as cruelty.

Just plain cruelty from where I am standing.

When she was eighteen months old, my mum was admitted to the hospital with scarlet fever.

She was in a ward of small children, all with the same symptoms.

When she returned home, she refused to walk and was dragging her right leg, when crawling.

It turned out that one patient had had polio. Consequently, every child in that ward contracted polio.

Yet my mom was no cripple

My mother was a hugely-talented woman.

I often wonder if the effects of polio challenged her to rise above her peers. Or was she simply just incredibly gifted?

Scholarship offers that she was supposed to get her parents to sign were always scrunched up and tossed somewhere.

She was the eldest of five, so university was out of the question. I still tend to be judgmental about this, but maybe that was how things were at the time.

Polio or not, victim or not, (she HATED that word, VICTIM), she was certainly never defined by her inability to march to the beat of a drum, anyone’s drum…the school drum.

Moreover, she never complained about her legs.

She managed to rear seven children despite her polio legacy.

Those legs took her on many walks with my dad.

She did her fair share of international travel with the same legs.

She stood on planks of wood to decorate her house…while we as children watched in fear!

Her legs served her well…one was just not so obedient as most of ours.

My legs, love or loathe them, have served me more than well.

I have used them to run marathons around the world.

I’ve used them to climb mountains.

I’ve also scaled rock ladders…only one set, but once was enough. That experience scared the hell out of me. I was petrified at the time. But my good old legs kept moving me closer to my destination and to safety.

Movement…movement…is what legs are for.

Even today, as I determinedly power-walk, they never fail to deliver.

I can do the splits when doing hyperbolic stretching.

Looking back over the years, they probably weren’t all that bad. They just gave me something to complain about.

Here’s to the power of legs that support, that carry us along in the tide of life, that were never really meant to be a fashion statement in the first place.

Here’s to movement, durability, and steadfast delivery. Here’s to all of us with our legs still intact.

And here’s to MY legs.

I don’t deserve them.

Inspirational speaker Nick Vujicic, was born without arms and legs. Despite this he has gone on to inspire so many, married, and fathered children. He says:

Often times we feel like either we can’t make a world of difference, or we feel that it’s not going to change anything anyway. The truth is you can change someone’s day, you can change someone’s life, but you have to show up and do what you got to do to actually see any fruit coming from it.