As someone with chronic foot trouble, I am so thrilled that it’s now fashionable to wear really thick, clunky sneakers and clogs. Here’s a tribute to such shoes before they were trendy. Or rather, a tribute to the original trend-setter: my mom. This essay was first published in Vol 25 of Steam Ticket: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, & Art.
Mom Shoes
I regret telling my mom that her shoes were ugly. Those thick soles like stumps, the dirt-colored pair, the gravel-colored pair, the pair wide and blunt at the toe like a golf club. The pair with the small hole where her toes stuck out, with which she wore socks. “Mom,” I said. “That looks dumb.”
When I was a teenager and my mom bought herself new party shoes, I told her they were for old ladies. Who even says party shoes anymore, Mom. They were thick, black platforms with an elastic top that wouldn’t disturb what she called her bad joint. Whenever she stubbed the toe near her bad joint, she crunched her nose and hissed and said, “goddammit,” and I thought, Mom, don’t be so dramatic. It can’t be that bad. Get some high heels, it’s a party. I thought she didn’t look as good as the other moms. The kind of teenage thought that haunts you.
I was twenty-two when I began to have a nagging ache in the front of my right foot every time I walked. An orthopedist informed me that the second metatarsal head had grown in flat and gnarled, the result of an injury I had gotten in a karate class when I was younger. My very own bad joint. To address it, he recommended I adopt rocking shoes—clogs, for example, or those fat orthopedic sneakers with soles like thick slabs of meat. Shoes my mom would wear. For a year I wouldn’t buy them, couldn’t buy them, because I was twenty-three and worked in an office building where high heels clicked down glossy hallways, fancy like the clinking of crystal glasses, and what was I going to do, clomp down the halls like a total oaf? Like my mom?
One Saturday, after more than a year of pain, I dragged myself on aching foot to an orthopedic shoe store on Fillmore Street called Walkabout, or Walk Around, or You Can Walk, or some other name indicating that they stocked only the ugliest, most practical footwear. The shelves displayed endless shoes my mom would wear, styles boasting thick straps and soft elastics and Velcro; flat soles, soft inserts, and wide toe beds that give feet so-called room to breathe. Every pair infuriated me. I still believed I had the God-given right to squeeze my toes into pointy patent-leather shoes with four-inch heels that accentuated my calves. I wished only to gallivant around my city until two in the morning balanced on such beautiful, rickety specimens.
I sobbed the day I bought the clogs and many days after, looking down at my feet housed roomily in those bulbous, block-like things. I went home and cried after a hip-looking woman in a trendy shop said, “Your shoes look so comfortable.”
My mom cried for me, too, before the surgery and after it failed and made the pain worse. She cried for me after phone conversations where I tearfully repeated the cruel refrains of my doctors: I can’t promise you’ll ever be pain-free. Your foot is like a broken-down car. She never told me she cried but I knew.
For years, when I found the occasional shoes that I liked and that I could walk in without pain, my mom transferred money to my bank account and told me to buy two pair.