Standing Tall

A story of height and heart

Hi, friend. Thanks so much for stopping by. Here, I write about finding the little bits of hope and joy tucked away in the long journey of waiting for circumstances to change. If you like what you read, please consider upgrading your subscription. Anything I earn goes right back into my writing.

My daughter stretches as tall as she can, her back flat against the living room wall. Her hair is pulled into two French braids. A neon band-aid is slapped across her scrapped knee. A smear of purple marker has somehow made its way under her nose. I am beside her. The backs of our heels press up against the baseboard. We stand rigid, eyes forward. She puts her splayed hand on top of her head, her fingers poking just below my elbow. 

Here. I’m right here on you, she says, stepping away from the wall, body relaxing. On the cusp of turning four, my daughter is eager to keep growing, to move up in shoe and pant sizes. She tells me she’ll grow taller than me, which will probably be true at the rate she’s going (although surpassing my five-foot-two self won’t be so difficult).

She says when she turns 100 years old she’ll be as tall as the sky. 

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There’s a Persian children’s story my husband likes to tell my daughter. Switching between English and Farsi, he recounts the dramatic tale: Once, a mother goat left her baby goats at home and warned them not to let the wolf into their house. Despite this, the sly wolf managed to deceive the baby goats by disguising himself as their mother and devouring all but one of them.

(At this point in the story, I give a sideways look to my daughter, wondering if this is all too much for her, a little too violent and scary. But she is enraptured, parroting my husband’s words to me, line by line, as if I’m not in the room with them listening to the same story.)

When the mother goat returned to find her lone surviving child hiding and the carnage the attacker left in his wake, she was furious. She sought help from the village knife grinder to sharpen her horns. Then the mother goat launched a vicious attack on the wolf, ripping open the beast’s belly with her newly-sharpened horns and freeing her baby goats. 

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After measuring ourselves, my daughter and I walk to the neighborhood basketball court. It’s early enough that the big kids haven’t gotten out of school yet and haven’t come racing to the park with their soccer balls, speed, and pent-up energy. She pushes herself forward on her scooter, begging me to chase her around the court. It’s another ordinary late afternoon—purgatory time, where the clock inches towards 5 PM. Bedtime will be in a couple of hours. A game of tickle monster, two books, a song, and a prayer.

I take a photo of our two shadows stretching across the basketball court, the camera catching the chain link fence behind us. Her arm rests casually on the handles of her scooter. Our silhouetted bodies meld into one shape because we are holding hands. The shadow from the sun eliminates the details, making it look like we are one connected form. 

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We need to stop by the market for tonight’s dinner. The only paved road runs by a house with two large, ferocious dogs who will bark and snarl at each passerby. They’ll lunge forward, but their leashes will halt their momentum, causing them to jerk back from the chain link fence.  

My daughter knows this. She anticipates the likelihood of encountering the dogs on the way to the market. Her steps begin to slow and drag across the black pavement. Her hand finds mine. 

Sing the song, she says, twisting half of herself behind me. 

The words to You Are My Sunshine are wobbly. The tune is messy. I am out of breath trying to sing and walk up the hill at the same time. It’s the song my mom sang to me as a young girl. It’s the song I sang in the shower as my belly grew rounder and rounder. It's the song that gives her the courage to keep walking. 

The dogs bark and growl somewhere behind the fence, but we don’t see them. We pass the house. The song ends. I feel her hand relax in mine.

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There’s a theory that suggests newborns experience themselves and their mothers as a single unit, with no clear boundary between them. The infant’s sense of security and self are deeply intertwined with the mother’s presence. 

I get a pit in my stomach for all the hurt my daughter will inevitably experience in her life: her first disappointment, her first ending of a friendship, her first heartbreak, and her first loss. There will be a time when I cannot sharpen my horns and free her from the belly of the beast. 

She will keep growing—past my elbow and then above me, perhaps even to the sky. One day, our silhouettes will divide into two distinct forms. And her hand once fused to mine will hold itself out to the world.

But I’ll consider it a success if, not only surpassing my height, my daughter outdoes my kindness, tops my bravery, and outshines my faith. I can’t protect her from every loss and disappointment, but I can show her how to sing a song of hope in the face of danger.

There’ll be a time for my daughter to reach towards the sky. But for now, her hand is in mine. For just a bit longer, our shadows are connected.

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Silhouette."