Change Your BIg Girl Panties

 Change Your Big Girl Panties

Kathy Heim

(Playing with anaphora in poetry & a 10 minute paragraph below)

Change your big girl panties is what my dad always told me 

From when I can't remember

Til days I can’t forget

Change your big girl panties he wrote

To a young girl at camp

Needing to be reminded

Change your big girl panties he whispered

To a young competitor losing a 

Competition she should have won

Change your big girl panties he winked

To a young lady heading off to college 

Be brave, try new things, and be safe

Change your big girl panties he cried

As he walked a young bride down the aisle

Marching into the unknown

You’ve got to change her big girl panties he smiled

While I held my baby girl

Changing my big girl panties I silently whisper

To myself as I lay my dad to rest. 

My dad used the phrase change your big girl panties as long as I can remember.  It started with potty training,  I apparently was not an immediate success, and I suppose he, and my mom,  had to literally change my big girl panties often. The summer I was 9, I went to camp in Michigan for three weeks. He wrote to me almost daily, ending each letter with “Change your big girl panties.”  Did he think I’d forget?  I came home telling him all the fun I had riding horses, learning how to kayak and canoe, and sang all the songs I learned.  And he  asked me if I changed my big girl panties - which I did.  As a young equestrian, he followed me to shows, cheering me on and keeping my attitude in check.  When I messed up, he’d often tell me to change my big girl panties.  The phrase evolved from the literal to the symbolic.  He meant, change my attitude.  This phrase became part of my adult mantra and a phrase that always brings me back to my dad.  When beginning college out of state, he used this phrase to remind me that I would experience new things and to roll with the punches and control my future with the choices I made.  As a new grandpa, he looked down at me one day as I held my baby daughter, and reminded me that I would literally be changing her big girl panties until she was old enough to do it herself.  A big responsibility that he had once assumed for me.  Oh my sweet dad.  When it was time to bid him a final farewell, that’s the phrase I thought of first.  I need my big girl panties more than ever now that he’s gone.