2013
While rushing to catch the bus, you slip in your cheap flats. Your hip starts to hurt. You can’t walk or even stand without pain. Days later, a technician x-rays your pelvis, and you’re embarrassed that your striped underwear appears faintly on the translucent image. This x-ray rules out a fracture and reveals joint inflammation instead. You learn that you have congenital bilateral hip dysplasia, meaning that your hip sockets never fully formed at birth. There’s nothing you could have done to prevent this hereditary condition.
The orthopedic specialist dismisses your concerns, a little too quickly, because you are not yet 30 nor a candidate for spendy hip surgery. Still, his diagnosis causes you to imagine the round knobs of your femurs popping out of your hip sockets like legs pulled off a roasted turkey. Invest in sensible shoes, he says. Gliding, not running. Elliptical, not treadmill. Wear a backpack to distribute the weight you carry.
2000
There’s news that your aunt’s large mutt, unable to contain her excitement, stood on her hind legs and pushed your grandmother down. Hila breaks a hip and injures her wrist. As long as you have known her, your grandmother—already 72 when you were born—has always moved slowly and this accident will slow her even more. After she undergoes surgery to replace the fractured bones, there will be a family joke about Hila’s bionic hip.
1993
You practice imitating your mother’s slightly duck-footed walk, the tips of your shoes pointing outward as you sashay down the sidewalk, thinking all elegant ladies move this way. You think it is the gait of graceful ballerinas.
Once, you show your mother, prompting, “Look at me!” as you swish one leg forward and out, the other leg forward and out, as if ice skating in your jelly shoes. “Stop that!” she scolds. The horror in her voice. “Walk with your feet straight.”
Circa 1955
Your mother is very young and very sick with polio, and her right leg has started to wither. Poliomyelitis, Latin for “gray marrow inflammation,” attacks cells in the spinal cord and brainstem, causing muscle weakness. When Doctor Jonas Salk successfully develops a vaccine, her family travels the bumpy roads from their mountainous region of the Philippines to a hospital in the city to get her one, before paralysis sets in. The vaccination leaves her with a lifelong fear of needles, though.
She limps when the pain flares. Unless looking closely, nobody will notice that one of her legs is shorter than the other and that foot is a bit smaller with a more dramatic arch. She will have difficulty finding shoes that hide the asymmetry and that fit both feet comfortably; so whenever she encounters a cute pair that fit these criteria, she will buy a set in every color available.
1993
Got Milk? advertising has all the generations in your household convinced that all you need is more milk. Your grandmother drinks it to battle her osteoporosis, the brittling of bone. Your mother pours you a glass of it every morning so you can grow strong. Coming from a line of petite women, you chug that milk because in this way, in the length of leg and spine, you long to be different from them. You want to be as tall as a pageant queen. They want this for you, too.
2017
Your parents own a shih tzu, but they never walk her. They tell you they exercise at the mall, a site fitting for your fashionista mother. The local mall opens its building doors one hour earlier than the shops inside do, just so seniors can walk the air-conditioned corridors. Your parents start near Barnes & Noble, turn the corner to the food court and the shuttered Sears, and backtrack to JCPenney before starting the loop again, walking four laps or until your mother says it’s time to stop. At home, she will massage the muscles of each leg, from toes to hips, and sigh as deeply as she wants.
2023
Babies are born without patellas, their kneecaps eventually forming from soft cartilage. By now, you’ve seen diagnostic images of your uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries from all angles, and your womb remains empty. Every time you hear a joint pop as you shift in your seat or stand up, you wonder if your hips can even withstand the weight of a growing baby. But what if? What if, next year, you count ten fingers and ten toes and two strong legs of a little girl who you’ll soon watch run and run and run.
