My Zero Percentile Son by Tara of Bite The Bedbugs

Clyde was born at 5 lbs, small, but certainly much bigger than plenty of other twin babies.  He left the hospital with me two days later.  No feeding tubes, no breathing tubes, no wires.  I was thankfully spared what so many parents of premature babies have to endure.  He had torticollis (a very twisted neck) as a child and low tone which meant he had little control over one side of his body.  Clyde is a twin and this happens sometimes with the baby on the bottom who gets essentially crushed by the baby higher up in the womb.  Part of his therapy involved a physical therapist coming to the house to work with him.  The doctors were very worried about his weight at that time because he had bad acid reflux and probably threw up about 50% of his caloric intake.  It was rare to get through a day without him throwing up.  At one point he had this special powder I used to add to his food.  Scandical it was called.  I think it was used for anorexics in hospitals.

Still, he grew.  Of course he grew.  He is now nearing five years old.  But he’s still very small.  When we go to the doctor’s office I dread the weigh in.  I dread more the growth charts they print out to reveal that he’s not on even on growth chart.  That he, according to growth charts, does not actually exist – there is his growth line way beneath the actual graph, in blank space.  Once he made it to the 5^th percentile and I practically burst into tears and hugged the nurse.

Ivy, his twin sister is by comparison tall, on the 75% percentile.   She is more boyish than he is in personality too.  She is messy and dangerous and uncouth.  Where Clyde is petite and cautious, a man who does not like to get his hands dirty, who weeps openly about just about anything and everything, Ivy is tall and tough, a tree-climber, a dare devil, a calamity. None of that worries me in any real way.  What worries me is Clyde’s height, his stature, his smallness.   He is the smallest in his age group at preschool, or really in any group of his peers.  He seems to get knocked down more; he is not as steady on his feet as his twin sister who by seems to barrel through life.  He made the calendar cut off to go to kindergarten this year, but I didn’t send him.  One of my reasons was because I wanted to give him one more year to grow physically.  Perhaps that’s silly.  What should matter is his maturity and his cognition, not his height, right?  And yet it does.  I myself was always the smallest in my class.  Or one of them.  Our science teacher had a growth chart on the wall to track our growth in 5^th grade.   At 50 lbs, I was the lightest by a long shot.  But I think it’s harder for boys.  Girls are petite and cute and delicate when small; boys don’t get to claim those words as something good.   We’ve even invented a term for men who are small and are perceived as compensating for it in other ways – Napoleon Complex.

So I worry.  I worry that even in this progressive time of no bullying and acceptance of everyone, he will be teased for being small.  Or passed over in some way.  By someone, for something.  I don’t know.  I worry too that this will be exacerbated by his sister’s presence in his same grade.  “Oh they’re twins?  But he’s so tiny,” I hear all the time.   I see so much about how to foster positive body image in our daughters.  Many of us are careful with toys, careful to avoid Barbies or Bratz dolls so as to encourage healthy attitudes about weight and body shape.  Barbie’s proportions are ludicrous after all.  And yet I don’t have those same misgivings when Clyde asks to have a superhero figure, unnaturally tall and pumped ludicrously with muscles.   I should say that I don’t worry excessively about his height or his weight.  He is after all very healthy.  I am fortunate to have healthy children.  And yet I imagine him going through elementary school, then middle school, then high school as small, short, overlooked, teased.  Lately I’ve tried to stop thinking about it.  As parents you sort of have to take one day at a time or you will drown; there’s only so much preparing you can do.  I wonder though if there are things I can do, perhaps ways of fostering healthy body image that are unique to boys?  Do you have a small boy, a boy who is perhaps the littlest in his class, the shortest, the lightest?  Or maybe you yourself were tiny and struggled because of it.  Am I giving too much thought to something I shouldn’t?

Tara blogs at Bite The Bedbugs about funny stuff.  She also forgot to send a bio.  But you can complain to her on the Twitter @bitethebedbugs.