Here are some of the things I worried about when I was pregnant with twins: dropping them after a bath; picking the right name for my daughter; finding the best stroller; being a good mother.
Here's what I didn't worry about: Buying shoes.
But sooner or later, you've got to give your child a bath, and you've got to name your daughter. Our neighbors gave us a stroller, and I won't know if I am a reasonably good mother until my kids have kids. I was not prepared, however, for that day when my kids were about 8 months old and I looked in the closet to find that my shoes—the shoes I'd known so intimately over the years—were all wrong.
The sleek, man-style loafers for work; the well-made leather boots; the dress-up metallic slingbacks; and the black pumps—all sat in my closet, waiting to get back into the action. The man-style loafers had no place on the playground. And pumps? Please. But I could not face putting on those beat-up, fallback Dansko clogs one more time. I needed a new shoe.
So I searched and I searched, but for some reason, I could not find the right shoe. I'm not saying there weren't contenders. Take the Tsubos. A reasonable choice, but with all those ties and colors, I found them intimidating. With high hopes, I ordered brown-and-blue Pony strap-on sneakers, but the fit was awful. My sitter, a terrific, sneaker-obsessed 23-year-old, insisted that Pumas were the solution, but something about them made it seem like someone cooler than me should be wearing them. (Say, someone who didn't need her sitter to tell her about Pumas.)
To be honest, the real problem wasn't that I couldn't find a shoe to fit my needs; it was that I didn't want the shoe I needed. That shoe was, and remains, the Merrell clog. But each time I set out to buy a pair, I had a fight-or-flight reaction. As I considered them, my heart would pound, my ears would ring, and a cold sweat would break out on my brow. I didn't even want to try these shoes on, never mind pay money for them.
Why couldn't I buy them? They were entirely appropriate, painfully functional, utterly sensible. I could just see myself throwing them on with my husband's raincoat and a public-radio tote overflowing with sippy cups and Goldfish. In my mind's eye, I would be walking out the door in the shoe equivalent of mom jeans.
The cold, hard fashion truth, however, is that I'd worn my husband's raincoat plenty of times without breaking out in hives. And I don't even own a public-radio tote. In my prebaby shoe life, I always bought the practical while admiring the fanciful. Back then I didn't need my shoes to do the talking. Yet something had happened to me between conception and baby, and now it seemed that I wanted my shoes to positively yammer. But to whom?
After all, the people who mattered most couldn't care less about what I was wearing on my feet. Every day for almost a year, my children stared intently at my face. Child-care books told me that my face was the most interesting object in their world. Not my shoes.
No one else noticed my shoes, either. When we would step out together, everyone looked past me and directly at my kids. Pushing a stroller with twins was like walking a half-dozen yellow Lab puppies. Every few feet, someone new would stop me for some coo-coo-coos and awwwwws, and that was right. I wanted the world to admire my adorable children. I didn't need anyone to stop me to say, "Nice shoes," certainly not at the expense of saying, "Cute kids!"
Still, when I looked down at my feet, I wanted to like what was there. I hadn't thought that was asking for too much. But after being stuck in shoe limbo for nearly two months, I was no longer so sure.
Then one night, I was clicking around Zappos and found a pair of Keen Mary Jane clogs. They looked pretty good. No laces, durable fabric, and they came in a color called Mercury, which online looked kind of shiny white. Entirely impractical. I had to have them.
When the Mary Janes arrived, they were pretty much what I'd thought they'd be—extremely comfortable and easy to wear—but the color was dove gray and somewhat practical, which made them wrong. The shoes made sense, but they didn't make me happy. Then again, they didn't make me want to weep for my lost youth either. I kept them.
And I keep looking. I have sneakers for the playground now: a brand called, appropriately enough, Simple, in brown with ecru stitching, not too slick. Because of their laces, they are not altogether practical. They are not perfect, but they are cooler in their own plain-Jane way than any shoe I've owned, and that's what I wanted—a shoe with just a little bit of something-something going on to remind me, when I glance down, that I've still got my own shoes to walk in. And not just to follow my kids.
