Shoe Fits

Women and their heels.  It's a famous relationship that's usually cast in the media as an obsessive devotion involving squandered paychecks, overrun closets and bloodied, broken feet.  But for my mother, my daughter and me, the relationship is a bit more complicated.

My mom was a Southern beauty queen who could not walk in high heels.  She maintains that she won her titles with her personality, which, if you've ever met her, you might believe, except that she's also quite beautiful.  (She'll also want me to note here that she did it for the scholarship money.)

She has had a fraught relationship with the raised heel, and I think she's handed it down to me.  From a pretty early age, she counseled me that I should at all times wear shoes that would permit me to sprint from an attacker, should that occasion arise.  There will be precious little time to pull them off, she'd caution, and don't think you will be able to beat them off with a stiletto, she would say, because in the real world that doesn't happen.  So let's just say that she is pretty much totally against shoes with heels of any kind for herself, and, quite possibly, for everyone else on the planet (though I haven't verified this with her). 

So it might just be my own relationship with shoes that's actually fraught.  I love high heels, you see, as do lots of smart, independent women.  Yet I also feel incredibly daft for wanting to wear them (in those few circumstances that warrant it lately), like I'm looking to be someone's prey.  Let's call it my Inner First and Second Wave Feminists, locked in an intractable, Iraqi-style conflict.   

My daughter is 21 months old now, and already has her own relationship with shoes, and heel-y ones in particular.  She's not yet ready for angst (though since she's a New Yorker, I'm looking for it around her second birthday), so to date her appreciation of heels appears to be pre-critical fascination.  Since she could walk, just after she turned one, she has been drawn to all the shoes in the house, including mine, her dad's, her brother's (who ignores them), visitors', all. 

But she really seems to love mine, and whenever a pair with a heel comes out of the closet (even the scary 5 inch heels pictured above), she's compelled to put them on and, somehow, totter around the apartment.  It's both adorable and creepy at the same time (an extension of my dilemma, see above).  Sometimes she'll use the aid of an assisting adult, which makes me think of Chopines, the 11-inch platforms worn by upper class women in the 15th Century that required the assistance of a servant or chivalrous gentlemen to allow their wearer to take a step. 

But I'm not ready to pronounce her the second coming of Carrie Bradshaw just yet.  When I pulled her into bed with me last night for a quieting snuggle around 3AM and hugged her little body to mine, I felt cold rubber hit my legs.  It was her very favorite shoes, which are a pair of rugged suede boots suitable for climbing slides, jumping in mud puddles and chasing squirrels.  They're pink.

This is an original post to the NYC Moms Blog.  Willa is a writer and an avid MBT wearer who chronicles her life in the city with twins at swivelheader.