A Fine Little Bugger - by Barbara Flink

Miami Beach, April 1955

The doctor handed the swaddled infant back to her mother, noting the puffiness in the tiny hands and feet. He'd seen it before. He had his suspicions, but for the moment, he just said, "She's a fine little bugger. Take her home and love her."

And so, Barbara's mother did.

Her older brother (almost three years old at the time) wasn’t exactly thrilled about his little sister at first but they do have a good relationship these days.

For six years, Barbara was just Barbara—an enthusiastic little girl with big brown eyes who had to work a little harder to keep up, who didn't quite look like the other children, who seemed smaller than she should be. When the official diagnosis finally came in 1961, Turner syndrome, her mother remembered the doctor's words from that first day. A fine little bugger. She was loved. A name for the difference didn't change that.

Growing up in Miami Beach in the 1960s without growth hormone—because it didn't exist yet, not for girls like her—Barbara learned early that the world wasn't built for someone who would top out at four foot four. Counters were too high. Shelves were unreachable. People looked over her head in crowds, and sometimes looked right past her as if she weren't there at all.

But they noticed her enthusiasm. She never let herself be ignored.

Although she thought she wanted to be an actress, Barbara saw patterns, relationships, and logic that felt as natural as breathing. When her family packed up and moved to California when she was ten, she adapted. New school, new kids staring at her height, same sharp brain figuring out how things worked.

A year and a half later, they moved back to Miami. Barbara was eleven and already understood something important: places changed, people changed, but she remained herself. Short, yes. Dismissed often, certainly. But stubbornly, determinedly herself.

When she first saw Mr. Spock on Star Trek: TOS she instantly fell in love as only a twelve-year-old Jewish girl from Miami Beach can. She had no idea that would lead to her career as a computer programmer.

The dating years were something else entirely. She laughed about it later—"I dated all seven dwarves," she'd say, and the joke worked because she owned it first, before anyone else could. Each date was a test: would he treat her like a curiosity? A child? Would he see her, actually see her? Most didn't. That was fine. She had other things to do.

Like computers.

In the early 1980s, when personal computers weren’t even a “thing” yet and most people couldn't imagine what they'd be used for, Barbara looked at them and saw the future. More than that, she saw something she could control completely. Code didn't care how tall you were. A well-written program worked the same whether you were four foot four or six foot four.

In 1982, she left Miami for the first time on her own terms. A job in the Philadelphia area. A chance to prove what she already knew: she was good at this. Really good.

She enrolled at Villanova University while working full-time. She sat in classrooms where she was often the shortest person by far, the only woman in most of her computer science courses, and older than many of her classmates. She reached her feet toward floors that didn't quite meet them in chairs designed for average-height students. She wrote code that was elegant and efficient and perfect.

It was in 1988 that she attended the first Turner Syndrome Society of the U.S. Annual Conference and she never looked back. She had found her “tribe”!

In 1989, she received her master’s degree in computer science from Villanova University. It may have opened a few doors, but it didn’t really change things that much. Mostly, it changed her opinion of herself.

Forty years of software development. That's what followed. Forty years of solving problems, of translating business needs into working applications, of being the person everyone came to when something was broken and needed fixing.

Kansas City in 1997—a new job, a new challenge.

Between Philly and KC, she was certain of one thing. She hates winter!

Atlanta in 2004—another opportunity, another city to learn. She'd lived in enough places by then to know how to build a life anywhere. Finding the nearby grocery stores. Learning the traffic patterns. The traffic in Atlanta is awful, by the way. Making the space her own. Her mom moved in with her, and they had a great time eating and shopping.

In 2007 she moved to Raleigh for yet another job opportunity.

Her mom moved with her but could no longer navigate as she used to. So, Barbara took on a new role as caregiver.

Throughout it all, Turner syndrome had been her constant companion. Not just the physical reality of it - the height that never came, the challenges that did - but the community. For almost forty years, she's been an advocate. Speaking up, showing up, being visible in a way that said: here's what a life with Turner syndrome can look like.

Not marriage and children, though that was fine for those who wanted it. For Barbara, infertility had never been the main issue. It was the world's assumptions about her capabilities that needed fighting. It was the counters built too high and the opportunities almost missed because someone looked at her height before they looked at her résumé.

She fought those assumptions by living her life out loud. Master's degree. Four-decade career. Seven cities. A lifetime of proving that short stature didn't mean short on ability, short on ambition, or short on anything that actually mattered.

Being single without children allowed her to travel. She has been to most of the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Israel, England, Austria, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan.

In 2015 she was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. And for the first time in her life, she was not “healthy”. Although she wasn’t really sick either (most of the time). She started treatment in 2018 and decided to retire in 2019. Not because she had to, but because she chose to. After forty years of proving herself, building software and building a life on her own terms.

Unlike many of her friends with Turner syndrome, she doesn’t have any heart, thyroid, and diabetes issues often associated with TS. Although she started wearing hearing aids when she was in her 30s and has taken medication for osteoporosis for about as long.

She decided to retire in Youngsville, North Carolina. A quiet town, a comfortable home, and a cat named Rolex who didn't care one bit about height or chromosomes or anything except whether her food bowl was full and her human was nearby.

Between her many doctor appointments, Barbara watches TV or scrolls through social media with Rolex beside her, and sometimes she thinks about that doctor in Miami Beach who handed her to her mother almost seventy-one years ago. "A fine little bugger," he'd said.

He had no idea how right he was.

She'd been fine all along. More than fine. She'd been exactly who she needed to be: Barbara. Software developer. Turner syndrome advocate. World traveler. Master's degree holder. Cat owner. A woman who'd spent her life proving that the only limitations that mattered were the ones you accepted for yourself.

And she'd never accepted a single one.