The other day I was chatting with my good friend Julie, the Julie I walk and pray with—I have many Julies in my life. I was explaining to her my shoulders are disproportionally large for my body. I apologized to her because my sizeable shoulders were atmospherically leaning over the table. Disagreeing, she said I was proportional; my body was just right. I was quite shocked. No one had disagreed with me about the bigness of my shoulders. Anticipating rejection, I habitually warned people.
During high school and college, my girlfriends and I complained about our bodies, gossiping and lamenting to each other about the way we were assembled. We talked hours on the phone, hours over pizza drinking Coke, hours into the wee of the night at pajama parties itemizing the deficiencies of our failed bodies. My fondest topic was my big shoulders and outsized arms.
Mom was the one who told me I resembled my dad’s body. “He was six feet tall and built like a football player.” I was five feet four inches and plump. Mr. Tordrup, my 4th grade science teacher, weighed each of us and I was the last kid he weighed. I was one pound heavier than Jack, the round, dark-haired boy who never got picked for sports teams. Heaviness looked like me. Mr. Tordrup scowled down at me, “Eighty-nine pounds.” I was crestfallen.
Mom selected A-line dresses sized “Chubby,” 14C or 16C for me. There really was clothing designed for chubby girls when I was a preteen. Mom critiqued my big legs and arms, my big build. Often, she would yell about the dime store cotton dresses I sewed and how hemming them slightly above the knee exposed too much of my fat legs. I longed to wear Twiggy miniskirts but settled, wearing chubby clothes and Kmart imitation clothing.
Around the house mom asked me to clean, seasonally washing the kitchen walls or weekly washing pipes under the bathroom sink. She was gone working and was tired, so I carried her heavy things, too.
My shoulders grew as mom grew sick. Eventually she became disabled. As she got still sicker, my shoulders grew bigger. Bigger so I could go alone to the laundromat and wash, dry, and fold all the family’s dirty laundry with the owner’s Great Dane for company. Bigger so I could be dropped off alone at the drug store to buy my personal items because it was my fault I had periods. Bigger so I could pull the weeds, mow the lawn, and paint the fence. Bigger so I could grocery shop for the family and worry about our next meal.
My shoulders grew bigger and bigger and bigger as I listened to her buy more and more life insurance policies with our limited money, becoming personal friends with the salesman at our small, rickety kitchen table. Our household was financed by her low wages and, during my teen years, by the scant Arizona welfare system. I was responsible to listen as her loud, high-pitched fears grew larger inside my head and terrified my young spirit. My shoulders grew even larger so I could shoulder her dramatic fears and frequent horrors of the sky falling onto our family. I became obsessed with parenting my parent.
My shoulders grew exceedingly large as I became emotionally and mentally exhausted and rebelled against her chores and her tenuous decisions that brought darkness and oppression to our family, and darkness and oppression to me. I thought my shoulders would explode, and I guess they did, right out of my mouth.
Vehemently, they erupted right out of my mouth at her, my brothers and, inside my screaming brain, at myself for being a failed mother to my brothers, a failure as a teenager, and a failure at changing the circumstances of our family.
I was a failure at changing my body parts and my tumultuous and confused internal life. I screamed to try to change her and my brothers who didn’t see anything wrong with the way we lived, who saw me as the problem, who saw me as the parent they hated. I was larger than life in our home, my shoulders filling the house trailer and the atmosphere outside the open windows.
I began yelling at her with all my might so she would stop telling me what to do and how she wanted things particularly done at home, at the store, at the laundromat, in the yard, and how I should live her life for her. I was the adult; couldn’t she see that? Her life was a failure, and I was seeking a future, stability, quiet, and a hint of light.
My shoulders were like my father’s, like a football player, large and broad and strong. They carried mom’s world and mine. They carried my brothers’ world, too, the household world parents shoulder. My shoulders twisted together and came up my throat and out of my mouth and made the atmosphere in our home distressing as I yelled and argued with mom and screamed at my brothers, demanding that they be different. They mocked me and called me a wounded water buffalo as I stomped through our mobile home with the tenuously structured floor that reverberated with my shock wave steps. I was loud and outrageous. My shoulders were not only big but loud.
I had mom’s big shoulders; I was mom’s big shoulders. And it wasn’t until I was about fifty years old that my shoulders began to shrink back into my body. They withdrew from the open windows and the atmosphere around me. They retreated down into my throat and attached themselves to my neck. They squared up and fitted into average women’s clothing. These are the shoulders Julie sees me with today. Maybe someday I will see myself as a well-proportioned woman. If I keep chatting with girlfriends over coffee about everyday life it just might happen.
Dorothy P. attends Adult Child of Alcoholics. Please send your 1st Person articles to phoenix@thephoenixspirit.com.
Last Updated on April 16, 2025