Standing Tall
The night I met Duncan and he didn't ask for my number, I said to myself, That’s okay, he’s too tall anyway.
And yet three decades (and three kids) later, I always forget how giant my family appears when we’re together in public.
“Wow. There’s some height in this elevator,” I heard someone joke as the doors closed. The voice belonged to a woman wearing a purple track suit. I chuckled to myself.
Moments before we left our house, I suggested Duncan get out of his track-like suit (as a trainer, he’s always in workout clothes) and “get dressed” for the Valkyries game.
I didn’t want to correct my husband’s choice of clothes–who wants to be told what to do?–but sometimes I’m on auto-correct. It just comes out.
Like the time my mom told my brother his blue polyester tux for prom wasn't good enough. It’s a family story that gets laughed about over and over. Sure, it says something about my mom–she has standards–but turns out, I do too. :)
We followed the track-suit lady out of the garage lobby, onto the sidewalk, and toward Chase Center. Duncan and Joey naturally pulled ahead thanks to their 6'7" frames and long strides. I could feel my shoulders scrunch as Kate and I got sandwiched between the droves of people headed down 16th Street.
When we started to drift apart, I felt two of her fingers interlace with my left hand. As she snaked us through little pockets of space on the sidewalk, guiding me toward the curb ramp, I turned to my almost-six-foot daughter and, holding back tears, whispered, "This is incredible. All these people are here to see women play basketball."
And that was even before I saw the lines to get in.:)
The awe–and the tears–kept building. The crowd was electric. The Jumbotron lit up. Even the ball, at first distracting with its white-and-black design, seemed to say: We’re doing it our way!
As the days passed, I kept thinking about the joy in the arena, the fearlessness of the players, and how different it must be for my daughter to grow up seeing a sold-out WNBA game. I remembered a joke I've told ever since my kids started playing themselves: I've never met a ball I haven't been afraid of.
Yeah, it gets a laugh. And like all good stories, it says a lot in just a few words.
Underneath that joke are a handful of limiting beliefs: I can't. I'm afraid. I'm not enough. (And somehow ‘I’m too much’ makes an appearance regardless of the story. Ha ha ha.)
But then I reminded myself: I’ve spent the last several decades writing a different story. On the page, of course, but in life, too.
A few years ago my mom read Speaking to What Matters when it was still a Google Doc. She told me she was proud of me, which as you can imagine, I appreciated. But she said something else that has stayed with me:
"You've expressed yourself."
Later when I decided to turn that very story into a book, she listened deeply to why I wanted to share it: my desire to be fully myself and help others do the same.
"I want to be more authentic, too,” her then 83-year-old self offered.
And maybe that's what I loved most about that night: watching the story change—for us all.