MEL BUTTLE
“She’s an accident waiting to happen”
According to the movies, being clumsy has its benefits – that’s how you meet romantic partners. You, the klutz, drop a pile of books, the other person bends down to help you gather them, your eyes meet over Intermediate Financial Accounting, they say, “maybe you could help me with my finances some day”.
Cut to you and the seductive stranger, noses deep in a shared chockie milkshake, picking out names for your golden retriever. If only this was the reality for us truly ungainly folk.
As a card-carrying clumsy person, I’d like to dispute Hollywood’s oversimplified and sanitised portrayal of our complex lives. My trips to the emergency room as a result of this affliction have been numerous. I’ve had this since childhood. I’d overhear my parents say things like, “she’s an accident waiting to happen, she just doesn’t look where she’s going”, and I certainly didn’t.
Let’s start with the small incidents and build up shall we? When I was two(ish) my parents got a backyard pool installed, I fell in it when it was empty and when there was water in it. Yes, that’s right, I don’t learn the first time, or even the hard way. It’s like I needed a wheel alignment as a kid, my body would just tilt downwards towards the ground and bang, there I was again looking at the world from the ground up.
For reference, falling in the pool while it was empty was much worse.
Primary school was a blur of “eggs” on my head, knee grazes and my timely once-a-fortnight vomit into a green ice cream bucket in sick bay. Being in sick bay was a bit of a highlight if I’m honest, it was like a behind-the-scenes, access-all -areas pass. You could catch a glimpse of teachers eating lunch, and hear the office lady whinge about how late Mrs Harris asks for her photocopying to be done.
As long as your eyes were shut, you could be privy to many a piece of school gossip, “Linda, get this, Kyle Roy’s mother rang, she says he doesn’t have ringworm, it’s just eczema. If that’s not ringworm I’ll eat my hat. If he’s back here tomorrow I’m sending him home again.” On the outside my elbows and knees would be throbbing with pain from falling off the playground equipment while trying to look cool eating a Tim Tam, inside my heart would be racing with all this juicy gossip.
Another major incident of that time was I forgot I was in a tunnel and stood up when the bell rang. Quite Pavlovian of me. I got an “egg” on my head the size of, well an actual egg.
Mum was like, “how could you forget you were in a tunnel?” I shrugged and walked out of sick bay, holding an icepack to my pounding head all the way home. I think my parents had hopes that I’d grow out of this by high school. I mean high school sounds grown up, you’re a teenager, you’re old enough to throw a burger on a grill a few hours a week for pocket money and learn to reverse-park you mum’s Honda Civic.
I think this level of clumsiness doesn’t go away – in high school I fell into an azalea hedge, dropped a weight on my toe during PE and fell down a flight of stairs trying not to be late to German, as you had to apologise and explain why you were late in German and, “Ich fell down das stairs” didn’t cut it with Mrs Moody either.
I’m no better today. This week I had a moment where I forgot how doors work and stood in the doorway and pulled the door directly into my own face in an attempt to close it. Whack! You would think by 40, I’d have mastered doors. Sorry to let you down but, no, they remain a complex part of my life. As I used to say to Mrs Moody, “Entschuldigung Frau Moody, ich bin ungeschickt.”