A couple of months I wrote about this issue but got NO responses
here on this newsgroup! In fact, immediately after I wrote my story
participation and articles on this newsgroup seemed dwindle down to
almost zero. Maybe people didn't like what I had to say because some
thought of it as 'flame bait'. Actually, that kind of thing is
something concocted to rouse people into anger. This is simply a
story about the dilemmas I have faced as a short man with a younger,
much taller sister.

Tall Younger Sister Shorter Older Brother

I was about 11 at this time, I was short for my age while Carla was quite tall. I was only 2 inches taller than Carla, who was about 3 years younger than me. When we see each other, I would run up to Carla and give her a big hug, lift her up, carry her around the house, and then throw her on the floor. Hi I’m a 19 year old guy and 5’0 and my sister is 15 and she is 5’10. She is also extremely stronger than me. She works out all the time and she probably will get more stronger. I’ve tried working out but it’s too hard for me. Anyways, it frustrates me that she is taller and stronger. She wears heels all the time to make her look even more superior. She’s 6’4 in heels.

I am 27 years old, and my sister is 21. This whole story started
back about ten or eleven years ago, when I was about 16 or 17. I had
always been short for my age. In grade school, I was always either
the shortest kid in the class, or within the bottom three in height.
As I entered junior high school, I noticed my height started catching
up, but not a lot. I was catching up with a lot of the girls, but I
was still very short in comparison to most of my male classmates.

I've never liked playing sports, and always shied away from playing
sports. I was never very good at sports. I was ALWAYS the last kid
to be called for school P.E. softball, baseball, or soccer games. I
really hated sports, in fact! My coordination was almost
non-existent. Now, I'm not a klutz; off the court or the playing
field, I'm as coordinated as the best of them. It's just that
something inside of me freezes when I get into a sportslike or
athletic-type situation. I'm terible at 'thinking in on my feet', or
thinking 'in motion'. For that reason I'm a terrible fielder in
baseball, because I can never think quick enough to know where to throw
the ball. I'm always way off. One particularly humiliating
experience came in 7th grade P.E., something that I think turned me off
to sports for life. Playing basketball, I actually made a basket...
for the OPPOSING team! Yes, hard as it may be to believe, my thinking
process in such situations just goes so haywire that I completely lose
awareness of what I'm doing, and where I am.

My younger sister, Jennifer, on the other hand, was always just the
opposite. She played sports avidly since she was really young --
since about 4th grade. In fact, my Dad -- no sports nut by any means
-- actually encouraged her, whereas he never encouraged me in the
slightest. Granted, she started out with a lot of inborn ability and
talent, and my Dad obviously saw that. As a little kid, she swam,
played soccer, then softball and then basketball from 5th grade. She
was sometimes on three or four teams at a time! She was also a hell
of a lot more extroverted (and popular) than I was. While she was
outside playing on her teams, I stayed home, inside my room, reading
weird science fiction books. This went on, year after year.
Sometimes, my parents would take me to see her games. But I could
never concentrate, and didn't really appreciate watching a bunch of
little girls play sports.

When I was about 17, I noticed that 'little' Jennifer, who was then
eleven, was almost my height. I think I had my strongest (and last)
growth spurt when I was a junior in high school. By the time I was a
senior, I think I had grown to my full height of 5'7'. Back then, I
was very skinny, although now I have filled out and my weight is pretty
much in proportion to my height (about 150 lbs).

And so, by the time I was 18 and beginning college (I went to a
local university and stayed at home), Jennifer was actually starting to
pass me in height! One of the embarrassing things was that my Mom
had always tracked my height and Jennifer's with pencil marks on the
kitchen wall by the door. After a while, we stopped tracking my
height, but my Mom continued to make marks for Jennifer, religiously
(like every month!) I was well aware of this, and it was quite
embarrassing (I tried to avoid looking at the wall when I passed that
area). The marks were labelled with Jennifer's initials and the month
and year, and there were a lot of them!

Very Tall Younger Sister

Around this time, with me in college, I had less and less contact
with Jennifer. I wouldn't attend her school games (she was a star
player on her school's girls' basketball team, and it seemed like she
was always going to practice). Whenever relatives -- like my aunts
and uncles, great aunts and uncles, and grandparents -- would come over
our house, there would invariably be comments about Jennifer's height,
and how she was 'so close' in height to her older brother. But,
someone would invariably say that her brother Tony was not finished
growing yet, that I was just a 'late bloomer', like my Dad. Not that
my Dad is tall -- he's about 5'8'. My Mom is 5'4'.

But Jennifer kept on growing. Part of her phenomenal (at least
for our family) growth could have been her really good appetite, and
the fact that she always seemed to be eating healthy foods. My
appetite had always been bad, particularly when I was a younger kid.
I was always healthy, though -- my lack of adult height has nothing to
do with sickliness.

By the time I was 19, I was still 5'7'. Jennifer, now, at 13, had
reached about 5'8'. Her figure was both tall and lanky -- really long
legs. She was thin, but also starting to fill out. She was an
extremely popular girl in school, had many friends (all of whom always
seemed to be camped out at our house!) and had become quite attractive.
As a college student, it was somewhat embarrassing to see my 'little'
sister grow past me in height. And she hadn't even started high
school yet. People would see us together and not quite believe we
were brother and sister, or would think that I was the younger sibling.

When Jennifer started her freshman year in high school, she was
5'9', and already one of the key, very valuable girls on her school
basketball team. It seemed like she lived, ate, and breathed
basketball. My Dad put a basketball hoop on the garage and Jennifer
would play in the driveway, with him or with friends. Saturday
mornings early, I'd be awakened to the sounds of Jennifer shooting
baskets or playing with her friends, since the driveway was right below
my second story room.

And, she continued to grow! By the end of her FRESHMAN year in
high school, she was 5'10' -- a full three inches taller than me! It
was REALLY embarrassing for me, as you might imagine, because now it
was impossible for people -- including myself -- to ignore the height
difference between us. For a while, I would wear a lot of tennis
shoes with really thick soles -- shoes I would pick out ESPECIALLY to
boost my height. I would also hope Jennifer would wear shoes with
heels that were as flat as possible. Now, by my junior year in
college, she actually towered over me, and there was no place to hide,
no way to avoid that fact. She was also filling out and her
basketball coach (a very petite woman, by the way) actually hired a
fitness and weightlifting trainer, from my university, a guy who had a
PHD in sports physiology or something like that, to coach the girls'
basketball team in olympic powerlifting! My sister and the other
girls on her team would actually go to the gym -- including on weekends
-- and do hours of weightlifting for strength, so they could pass the
ball with more force. Not only was my sister now taller than me, she
was also getting stronger -- and it showed!

Now my sister was a star forward on her basketball team (she also
played volleyball especially in the summers). My parents would
actually expect me to accompany them to her 'big games'. Sometimes I
actually would (since I was still living at home, I felt pressured to
do it, even though I'd rather be almost anywhere else). My sister was
an awesome player, I have to admit. During her time playing in high
school, she actually scored a total of over 2,000 points!

By the time Jennifer was 15 (and I was a senior in college), she
had reached almost 6' tall! And she wasn't through yet. By the
time she graduated from high school, she had reached her full height --
6'1'! She completely towered over me at my college graduation, and
even more at her high school graduation. Not only that, in her
senior year she had taken up swimming again and was on both the
basketball and the swimming teams -- and was a star on both!

Tall Younger Sister Short Older Brother

In college, Jennifer decided to go out for the swim team. She
also coninued with the weight training, and the PHD who taught her
weightlifting in high school continued as her personal trainer in
college. Now, not only was she really tall, she started to get really
muscular, and it would just kill me to stand beside her and think of
what must be going on in people's minds. I thought of taking up
weightlifting, to increase my bulk (my Dad STRONGLY was suggesting this
for years!) but I gave up on the idea, almost instantly, because I knew
I just couldn't begin to compete with a sister built like Jennifer.
So I decided to concentrate on other, less physical pursuits -- the
things I was always good at, like writing.

Well, I could go on with this story, but I'd really like to hear from
other alt.support.shorters out there who may have either had similar
experiences, or who have any ideas about the best way to cope with
sucha a situation -- even thought the worst of all this -- having to
live with a towering 'little' sister -- is now behind me. I love my
sister -- who graduated college with a 3.5 GPA and will be starting Law
School at Georgetown in the fall -- she's also a BRILLIANT girl -- but
it was really hard being outshined by such a young lady, and was an
experience that just doesn't happen to everybody!

Tony