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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.
✍️ I’d love to know…
Was there a point when you traded in your heels (or another fashionable but painful form of footwear) for “mom shoes”?
Was there something your mom (or any adult) used to do that you found embarrassing at the time but you understand now? Do you find yourself doing the same thing?
Mom Shoes
I bought my first pair of clogs when I quit my admin job to become a software engineer. But then, later, when I needed to be able to assert dominance in an overwhelmingly male profession without, you know, actually asserting dominance, I learned the value of footwear as a tool of indirect dominance, specifically boots, specifically very tall boots ( see instagram.com/amywearsboots for an endless catalog of said boots). Boots with stiletto heels clicking on the concrete floor of the tech company where I was director of engineering. Heels that made people say "wut? She's an engineer? wait, she's The Director of Engineering?" I still can't get over the feeling of personal power conveyed through those footwear choices.
But the truth is now I mainly stick to flat or platform boots for daily wear and save the stilettos for the photo shoots and parties, not running errands around town.
Protip for folks who do love heels but struggle with foot pain -- check out dance brands like Burju Shoes https://burjushoes.com/ (women owned, too!) They offer choice of heel height and style as well as extra comfortable insoles that can make pretty shoes feel less disastrous.
As a chiropractor I have worked on hundreds of lovely feet with these kinds of problems. Fortunately I live in a small, mountain town where I don’t get push back when I tell folks they need roomy, Mom type shoes. We literally live in Blundstones (at least mine are red).
I came of age in the 80’s and lived in heels until I became a chiropractic student and they had to go. Now I occasionally still wear a heel to wall from my car into my office, just so I don’t forget how to do it!
It took me a decade to stop buying shoes for the life I wish I had rather than the one I do have. (I love the life I have, it’s simply devoid of heels and sparkle of any kind!)