
If Clumsy was a sport I would be the most famous, richest one. I am a clumsy person, which is funny because I have had years of training as a dancer. Dancing is so elegant and purposeful and uses muscles you do not even know you have. But here’s the thing if my steps are not choreographed and I am left to my own devices, Bitch is Clumsy.
For example, the other day I was in the shower……okay stop laughing you don’t even know what a clumsy person can even do in a shower the surfaces are all smooth and soaped up and slippery as fuck…so you don’t even know. I was in the shower and using bar soap because I am clearly from the times when Pa bought the farm by simply staking it and claiming it as his…You know aka the Prairie. I was soaping up in the shower like I’m some ancient being that has come back to warn us all, and the soap slipped down my chest under my boob and out from my armpit and then ricocheted off of the shower wall and proceeded to knock down every shampoo, conditioner and shaving gel bottle in the entire shower area. Now if this was a sport I would have won. I would collect my millions and go home. People would be all like…”Let’s see a replay on that, Jim.” People would be tweeting, Becki is a God! No one can do it like Becki does. And other tweets that sports stars get to be the noun in.
Another example is, I was driving down the road with my youngest daughter in the car and as we are casually talking a fucking spider comes dipping down on it’s web right in front of me. I grab the web and went to shoo it out the window, but the window wasn’t open and I was the driver and one hand was busy steering and the other one was being the hero and so I flung it into the closed window and lost it. I instantly begin my decent into full on anxiety as I am trying to drive to the nearest exit. I get to a parking lot and look for the spider. I grab a napkin and find the spider and go in to scoop the spider up into the napkin, you know like you do. I don’t want to kill the spider I just want to evict it from my car. I put my fear forward and grab the spider in a “Don’t hurt it” type of way and the next thing I know the fucking spider is crawling out and it touched my finger. Before I say another word I would like to tell you all that my daughter calls this story “Remember the time when you threw that spider at me?” I didn’t throw it at her….I threw it at NOT ME! There is a Humongous difference. Then I jumped out of my car because again I have lost the spider and all my nerve. As I jumped out of my car I accidentally hit my car door into the car next to me. I was all like “Oops, I’m sorry about that, would you like to trade cars as payment?” which would solve both the ding in their car and the spider is lost problem in mine all at the same time. But no one was there for the trade and my car door didn’t even leave a mark…so now I have to go back in my car and get the spider out…but this time that motherfucker has to fucking die. I’m so sorry spider, but thems is the rules. You evaded my two attempts to save your life…I mean if being thrown from a car going 55mph down a highway didn’t kill you that is…and now it is either you or me. I grab the wad of napkins and search for the spider with death in my heart and I just murder the poor fucking thing…to the point that I had legs in one part of the napkin and body parts on the carpet of my car and maybe the head part on my shoe because I stomped it after I squished it and then I rubbed it ferociously with my shoe and again with the wadded up napkins. I mean I certainly would have won some money for that clumsy clusterfuckery for sure. There would be movies on that shit. There would be all the days I have trained leading up to the great clumsy of 2019 involving the other team “the spider” and it looked like the spider had won, but no “She is tired. She is beaten, but here she comes back against all odds and really murders the actual fuck out of that spider. What a victory folks! You hardly ever see such a terrific win like these! That is why she is so rich and famous, not everyone can do it quite like Becki.”
Then there was that one time I was carrying my son who was a baby, on my hip. I just dropped my daughter off at preschool and I was herp derping over to the Post office to grab the mail and some stamps….but that is not the only thing I got. As I was leaving I was talking to my son and giggling and I stepped in a hole and twisted my ankle so bad that I heard it snap. MY face went white and I passed out from the sheer pain of the tendons ripping off of my anklebone. Luckily my sister was there and she scooped my son up and then me and when I came to, my shoe was next to my foot and I was like “OH MY FUCKING FUCK, MY FOOT BROKE CLEAN OFF!” and it felt like it too. She drove me to the hospital because, Duh, my foot broke off. I get to the hospital and they asked me about a hundred times if my husband did this to me because they completely underestimated my clumsiness and didn’t believe that some asshole can rip all of the tendons off of their ankle by stepping in a hole and twisting their ankle. But, I don’t mean to brag, I am that kind of asshole. I had X-rays, my sister had to use the payphone to call my husband at work because I am from the olden times, and when he got there he also had to answer some spouse abuse questions as well. I mean I am not even mad that they did that because they should, it’s just that I am that clumsy. I am so clumsy that they think I am lying about how I am getting hurt. I know, my husband is so lucky to have me.
Another example, and I’m not even sure if this is clumsiness, but I think Yes, because it is like mental clumsiness, which I am going to say is a thing. I was sitting at my parents’ kitchen table doing my math homework and the phone rang, and on the prairie we answered the phones when they rang because otherwise you could not tell who they were, so I ran over to answer the phone before they hung up and we never knew who it was calling us on a random Tuesday at around 6ish pm in the eighties, we can’t have it, those kinds of mysteries could never be solved. I grab the big handle on the phone that is on the wall with the rotary dial and I urgently say my greeting and it is one that we all say but then mental clumsiness sets in and I shout urgently “HELEVEN!” because the answer to my math problem was eleven and I was thinking it through trying to multitask and all and heleven was the word I urgently and breathlessly shouted to the stranger that called on some random Tuesday at 6ish pm in the eighties. If you remember calling my house on some random Tuesday at 6ish pm in the eighties and got some chipmunk that answered your call by shouting “HELEVEN!” and then hanging up on you abruptly….now you know the truth. It wasn’t a riddle you had to solve before calling us back. It wasn’t some sort of spy ring we were running at our house that was the color of a school bus at the top of the hill, I mean we always did have cars parked all over the lawn and shit and people were always coming and going at all hours day and night, but that was just us. We weren’t spies. We were just regular people who lived in a tiny school bus yellow colored house on the top of the hill that used bar soap in the shower, but don’t you worry about that little “HELEVEN” shouting Becki because she is about to be a sports star of which we have never seen before. She is going to be famous for her clumsiness. She’s going to win the Clumsy Gold medal in the Olympics. Sure she is going to have injuries that she is going to have to come back from, the ankle injury of 1996 was particularly bad. Sure she is going to get into some troubling situations when she may believe that she is going to lose like with the spider, but she is always going to come back and win. Why? Because she is Becki and she is a clumsy legend and You know what, that isn’t taught, that is just pure, natural born talent. She is a treasure, someone please wrap her in bubblewrap and don’t let her near the stairs.
Moral of my story: Do you have something that is not considered not such a great attribute, such as clumsiness? Don’t let it get you down. We all have something and just think about it, what if that particular thing studdering, lisping, can’t solve simple math problems without a calculator, or clumsiness was an attribute? What if our social construct valued that, you would be feeling pretty good about it then, right? So change the way you think about it. Don’t think of it as a bad thing. Accept it and let yourself know that it is what makes you special. I mean we can’t all be graceful, some of us have to be the type to fall off of curbs because you stood too close to the edge of it. *yes I have done that. Some of us are endearingly clumsy and we have to accept it and say hey besides the injuries it is what makes me interesting. I challenge you today to accept that one thing or maybe you have many, accept it and ask yourself can I live with this? Can I love this about myself? If you can’t accept it then try and change it, if you can’t change it try and accept it.
Until next time 😉