After I told Cheyenne that she was getting really tall the other day (she is getting amazingly close to my height at the ripe old age of 11), she made a comment that I have not been able to stop laughing about.  

She said, "I want to grow up to be freakishly tall so I can intimidate men." 

Oh my.  I didn’t see that one coming…and as a result I busted out laughing when I heard it.  That was a rookie mistake and I know better, but that comment caught me off-guard.  A parent should never laugh at the things they don’t want their kids to repeat.  Of course I know this – this isn’t my first rodeo.  Cheyenne is child four (of four – I have to say that so as not to tempt fate to add additional children to the count in a deeply ironic twist)…I have had years – indeed decades – of practice.  Alas, every once in awhile one gets past you.  Such was the case with the freakishly tall comment.  I just didn’t see that one coming.

I thought about it after the fact.  Not sure where she picked up the notion that tall girls – more specifically "freakishly" tall girls – intimidate men.  I am a short girl myself and her father isn’t all that tall either – we have no base by which we could inform such a comment.  I have concluded that she must have picked it up in her chats with extended family or friends – both the notion of tallness moving from normal to "freakishly tall" and height in women being an intimidation factor.

It is always interesting the things kids pick up in their travels.  Of course when they utter things like this out loud everyone within earshot looks at you and wonders what the heck you teach your child.  It matters not that you have expressed shock and dismay upon hearing it there for the first time – the question about what goes on in your household lingers in folks’ minds.  Surely you have experienced this – either as the stunned parent or as the observer trying to fathom how the child would say such a thing unless they had heard it at home.  I know…I have been on both ends of this situation.

Luckily for me, Cheyenne’s comment was not uttered in public – well, not until it was repeated here.  The point though is that some times kids just pull these things out of nowhere and the parents are the most stunned of all.  That was me the other day…stunned…well, actually a bit more amused at the statement originally and then a bit stunned at her desire to intimidate men based on unseemly height.  I was particularly puzzled because as a short girl with a big personality I would think that I have illustrated well to my children the notion that equality is not necessarily a function of physical stature, but instead a function of who you are and how you fill the space you occupy in the world.  But I guess equality is not what she is looking for – the word was "intimidate" – and there was an an image of world domination that immediately came to mind.

I said it before and I’ll say it again – oh my.  I guess all I can hope for at this point is that her growth spurt sputters out a bit and that her goal of being "freakishly tall" is never realized…if not, prepare to be intimidated men by the freakishly tall girl – and just ignore the short embarrassed woman standing behind her.

Day three hundred and seventy-five of the new forty – obla di obla da

Ms. C