Memo to all friends and current and future acquaintances of Christpher Uzar’s, both young and old:
He knows he’s short, and while he’s not overly thrilled with that fact, he doesn’t need to be constantly reminded of it. Especially since he didn’t do anything wrong in life to bring on snide comments and ridicule from those who don’t understand that they’re making themselves look smaller than Uzar, who temporarily stands just 4-foot-9 as a 13-year-old 8th grader in the Wilson School District.
“It’s annoying,” he says. “It just makes me annoyed.”
Besides, even if he was somehow a detriment to society or his school, why would people choose to tease him about it?
Good question. One that even his mom, Cathy Uzar, a former teacher and boys tennis coach at Lebanon High, struggles to answer. Because it’s not classic bullying, despite the way it may seem.
“It’s weird,” Cathy said over the weekend. “It’s not like he goes to school and is bullied. It’s just like everything goes back to his height, if that makes sense.”
In a way, that makes it all the more disturbing to Christopher. He’s a talented junior tennis player and he has friends, so it’s not like he’s socially isolated by his tormentors. He’s simply ridiculed for not being of average height. And it’s taking a toll.
“It’s like a constant reminder, ” she said. “He’ll walk in and want to do something and then someone will say, ‘Well, can you because you’re short?'”
The good news is Christopher didn’t just draw the genetic short straw. There is a reason for his uncommonly small stature – a lack of human growth hormone in his body, for which he is now receiving treatment.
“It’s something we’re learning that is way more common than we thought,” Cathy said. “It’s just crazy, the whole situation and how it all kinda went down.”
Christopher’s twin sister, Madison, is also very small for her age, which prompted a trip to the pediatrician, where Cathy learned a few more things she didn’t like than she did like.
“Their whole lives, I’ve been going to the pediatrician,” she said of her twins, who were each born premature at 33 weeks, “and I started to see other kids (their age), I started to see that (her kids) were a lot smaller. I would say to the pediatrician, ‘Hey, is something going on here?’ And they’d say, ‘No, no, no, everything is fine. They’ll catch up. It’s fine. They’re following their own growth curve.'”
“When I talked to other parents, they said, ‘They told us the same thing,'” she said.
“It’s almost like as parents you have to fight the pediatrician and say, ‘No, something’s not right here.'”
Determined to find a cause, Uzar had Christopher undergo testing that revealed his bone age was 10 years, 8 months instead of the almost 13 years of age he was at the time.
Christopher was then sent to see a pediatric endocrinologist, where it was determined that his growth hormones were too low. After a check of his pituitary gland to make sure no other factors were at work, Christopher was then approved for a daily treatment that should eventually help him breach a more “normal” height of 5’9″.
And along the way he learned something else, that he is not alone.
“He found a boy at school that’s going through the same thing,” Cathy reported. “There are actually three kids at Wilson that are going through the same thing.”
Unfortunately that hasn’t stopped the teasing entirely, but it has made it a bit easier to take.
“Now the kids at school are like, ‘You’re taking steroids,”‘ Cathy said. “He can just never get ahead of it.”
That doesn’t mean he hasn’t had his share of victories, particularly on the tennis court, where he maintains a national ranking in the 14-year-old age group. That does take a bit of the sting out of the barbs, he admits.
“It does,” he said quietly but firmly.
“He’s done really well tennis-wise,” Cathy said. “Pretty accomplished there. Usually he’s got to play kids sometimes a foot taller than he is. You should see the boys when he beats them. They get pretty emotional about it, like, ‘Oh my God, I just lost to someone who goes up to my armpit.’ Every thing he does, the height is attached to it.”
“I would say keep your head up. Your height doesn’t define you,,” Christopher said of his advice to others who may find themselves in his shoes.
Cathy takes that advice a step further, reminding her children, through past experience, that negativity from others doesn’t necessarily ever go away.
“I think we all have our thing,” Cathy said. “I also try to remind Christopher that you’re going to get taller, but somebody is going to say something about you always. It’s never going to stop.
“After you’re tall somebody is going to say, ‘I don’t like your clothes’ or ‘y’Your hair is dumb.’ You just gotta like yourself regardless of your height or the way you look.”
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