Someday Shoes
I decided I wanted the $140 house slippers in the shade Wren seven minutes prior to switching tabs on my phone and reading about the havoc Hurricane Irma was wrecking in the Caribbean. This was before it touched down in Florida. In the very same day I learned there was such a thing as $140 slippers in the perfect shade of leopard, I also learned that there is an island named Barduga located where the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea meet.
I swayed in my kitchen on a wooden swivel chair and thought about how those fancy slippers would be perfect for a honeymoon. Then I wondered about all the people on honeymoons where the hurricane hit. Or even all the people that planned weddings in the path of the storm. And would it be okay if I got those slippers? But what do you do if a storm threatens the site of your wedding? What if it threatens your entire state? Worst of all—what about all those women set to go into labor?
Rather inexplicably, those slippers in the shade they called Wren had me vexed. But I also thought an awful lot about all those people with nothing. With no shoes. I thought about the many shoes in many houses that all had to be left behind right before they were swept away. I knew early on the two were tied together in my mind: the storm and the slippers. Not in some Aesop’s fable way where the spoiled American mom realizes she already has the most precious shoes of all, her children’s Natives. How privileged is she, the self-centered wretch. It took a storm 3,000 miles away to shake her of her slipper lust.
Not like that.
But like how, I did not then know.
I did know very early on, about three paragraphs in to the first news report I read about Irma, that I would not be purchasing the slippers.
I wanted the shoes and I wasn’t going to get the shoes and it really got me thinking.
***
Think about it: You see something you want. You know that it is either within your budget to buy this item or that your birthday is coming up. It is not outside your grasp. But you also know that should you acquire this item you would experience day after day only one thing. Mink lined disappointment. Your ability to enjoy the—let’s say for example—the slippers, would be routinely hindered by the tiny humans you serve. The tiny humans every empty-nested stranger swears will grow so fast and be gone in a blink and just like that—snap—be off. These people you have never met don’t even ask your name, but they watch you struggle to steer your weighted shopping cart with one hand and clutch your preschooler’s hand too and try so hard not to hit the tower of canned pinto beans on sale, and all the while they stand there with two free hands and guarantee that in the time it takes to get your van loaded these kids will be so grown you can wear whatever shoes you want for weeks on end while enjoying food at whatever temperature you desire without having to share a single bite.
“That’s what I hear,” comes the breathless reply.
Sometimes when the strangers talk to me like this my mind catapults away from the heavy cart to a church some decades from now where I sit in the front row and watch these babies leave me and make a new family all their own. I feel stupid getting misty eyes next to canned food.
But other days I think, do I really have to wait 20 more years just for house slippers?
I mean, think about that.
***
A storm is devastating lives and I am bummed out about slippers. I have three healthy, vivacious children in my home for a fraction of my life and theirs and I get grumpy because one them demanded the tortilla off my burrito (kind of pivotal to the whole burrito thing) and it seems like I am always having to sacrifice my metaphorical tortilla and yes, fine people have it worse and better women would happily trade me places and I have been given riches aplenty but what I ordered today was a burrito and that requires a tortilla. A tortilla that was taken from me. Practically stolen, if you will.
Are we talking about tortillas or my little tantrum back there? This seems like something deeper than corn or flour.
I send an S.O.S. text to the person I know will nod on the other side of the phone. Hard climb today.
Now I wait for the reply.
***
So I hopped off the chair and walked around my house as Irma raged and slippers went unpurchased and I reviewed all the shoes motherhood (A righteous storm in itself. The connection?) has sent my way. Motherhood started for me with a pair of cotton socks, dyed an introverted shade of turquoise and fashioned with these small white diamonds on the sole made of rubber. Those rubber diamonds are there to prevent patients from slipping on heavily waxed hospital floors. I got these socks on the fifth afternoon of my first miscarriage and I wrote about them in an essay titled Bad Math.
Perhaps it was then a slight obsession with motherhood and footwear was born.
What I did not say in the essay—because it had not occurred at the time of writing—was that I became something of a collector of those socks. There is the original turquoise pair, I call them Miscarriage Socks. Then came Kajsa Socks. That pair was pulled on my feet by a friendly nurse while my legs went numb during my c-section. Next to join the cotton anthology came Arm Surgery Socks. Those are gray. A tumor grew in my right forearm and a pathology report came through after I’d already been at home with the socks for a week. It concluded the tumor was pregnancy related. When I showed up at the hospital two years later to give birth to my second son the very same nurse who cared for me with my daughter was on duty and when she asked if I’d like socks I said “Yes, I didn’t even pack a single pair because I have been waiting for your guyses.” More like, “I have been waiting for your guyses!” It was admittedly too much, but Linda handed me Caleb Socks without comment. My third pair of introverted turquoise. I was thrilled. I’d lost Kajsa Socks the year before because those were my favorite and there is only one fate awaiting anyone’s favorite socks.
My exuberance over the socks, surely unmatched by most previous patients’, would probably make it hard for Linda to believe I used to wear stilettos. Cute sneakers as well. The kind that would never compete in any athletic event more strenuous than a trip from Starbucks to a nail salon. In my heydays (or are these them?) I wanted Louboutins and I put thought into the precise angle at which I would cross my ankles to get those sexy red soles to flash. I bought riding boots for all three weeks of southern California winter. In 2009, after seeing the Rihanna video for So Hard, I bought lace up combat boots. Laugh if you must, but I was feeling myself in those boots.
And then the storm of my century, Motherhood, forcefully catapulted me to a hospital bed in 2017 where I went full-on Gollum for anti-slip socks that stop just above the ankle.
At the risk of strangling an innocent metaphor to death, allow me this: mothering, rather the price of mothering, rather the prices—plural—stops my feet in their tracks. It is not the obvious that jars me. Trading in the two-piece for something high-waisted with words like tummy control on the tag? Got that, no problem. Trading in the sports car for the minivan? Handled that day like a champ. Feeling like the van was the singular best decision of my life? Still doing fine. Not sleeping? Choking down cold chicken nuggets as I race to wipe someone’s buns before things get really messy? Thinking of yoga pants as an investment piece with little to no intention of any downward dogging? I am fine.
These are not the parts of my life that grab my face with two hands and force me to look reality in the eyes.
Recently, it’s the footwear.
This is not about bitterness. Or resentment. Or some notion that the real me wears high heels and the minivan-driving, nugget-eating, yoga pant investor is a fraud and also kind of a downer.
This is the real me. The real me wears thick socks now.
I really am a mom of very young children. That’s the mountain I am climbing. Mountain climbing is the stolen analogy my husband and I share for what we are smack at the start of. Raising children into adults. Adults who will live forever.
Mountain climbing is hard. Mountain climbing is slow. Climbers are both methodical and adventurous. They understand what they are undertaking is dead serious, their very lives are at stake. But they do it for beauty, for a chance to feel small and simultaneously like part of something so much larger than themselves.
I pulled up the slippers again. Just to look at them. Just to imagine them one more time. Just to see if any were on sale.
I closed the tab, put down my phone, brewed some tea and then prayed for all the moms of newborns way over there in the hurricane until my daughter interrupted me with a sparkly Ariel shoe tossed in the general direction of her brother’s head.
I got down from my seat but whispered to myself, “Up I go.”
I am climbing mountains and you can’t get very far in $140 slippers.
Written by April Hoss.