From Smart Girls Say Yes
by Fern McAllister
Take it from me—if you’re going to adopt a Say Yes attitude, you’d better take care of your feet. You’ll need them to launch yourself into new adventures. To rise tall and be heard by the powers that be. And especially to stand your ground, refusing to cede your territory to those who aim to steal it.
Plus, trust me when I say this, you’ll look damn-well ridiculous trying to pair orthopedic sandals with sequins. Don’t ask me how I know.
Now, if you think I’m exaggerating when I claim that your feet just might be the secret to your ongoing success, you’re most likely a woman in your twenties or thirties. In which case, you definitely need to keep reading.
To commence our lesson, let’s travel back to the ’80s, when my suburban Milwaukee school district took the “scared straight” approach to sex ed. To walk into tenth-grade health class was to surrender oneself to an assault of shock-and-awe imagery designed to frighten our psyches and neuter our libidos.
Old man Sorenson loved to remind us that “herpes is forever, kids.” But so is plantar fasciitis, and how I wish to heaven above our Dr. Scholl’s insoles–wearing teacher would have thought to mention that.
Fast-forward to the ’90s when, in my twenties, I could do just about anything in heels. Walk the one mile uphill from the BART station to my apartment or start the night at the Market Street end of the Embarcadero and finish it at Marina Green. I celebrated Halloween in the Castro dressed as Cher and didn’t take off my four-inch platform boots to check out the party underway atop Twin Peaks.
Now, as a forty-something-year-old woman, every six months my podiatrist gives me a shot between my toes.
I’m not heroin curious. I have a condition called Morton’s neuroma that, gone untreated, makes it feel as if someone cut my foot open in the middle of the night and inserted a shard of glass between my third and fourth toe knuckles. Twice a year, Dr. Feelgood fills his syringe with steroids and says, “If I had a nickel for every woman who regrets the shoe choices of her youth.”
If only I had a nickel for every doctor who’s ended an appointment by wishing they had a nickel for every condition with which they’d just diagnosed me. Eight years ago, I showed up at the obstetrician’s office wanting to know how I could possibly have gotten pregnant a third time, never mind that I was still nursing my eight-month-old, and on the pill, and married to a man who traveled more than he was home.
The doctor smiled, shook his head, and said, “If I had a nickel for every woman who got pregnant while on birth control...”
Excuse me? Perhaps old Mr. Sorenson should have leaned on that tidbit a little more heavily in between slideshows of genital warts.
While I don’t regret any of my children, I do regret not taking better care of my feet. As every philosopher from John Muir to Dr. Seuss will tell you, our feet take us places, and those places can change our lives.
Must I continue to stress this point? Yes, I must.
Let’s turn to Carolina as our first example. She wasn’t a runner when I first met her. She exercised furiously, aerobicizing her body into a lifelike rendition of a Reebok catalog model. Until, one day, while walking to class across the Marina Green, she eyed a running group assembling for warm-ups. The leader was just her type. “I’m a sucker for a Matt Damon look-alike.”
It was a Bay to Breakers training camp, the annual 12k across the Golden Gate Bridge and through the streets of San Francisco. Carolina said, “I ran five miles in Reebok aerobics shoes that afternoon. Shin splints for days, but it was worth it.”
Within a month, Carolina ran her first Bay to Breakers. Then she joined the coach’s San Francisco marathon training program and ran that. Then a backcountry trail marathon. And so on and so forth.
She never slept with the Matt Damon doppelgänger. “I don’t think I ever even kissed him. But I’d never have run even a mile if it weren’t for that smile.”
Next week, she leaves for an expedition to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. But here’s the catch: the trip was originally scheduled for last year. Only Carolina trained so hard she suffered a stress fracture in her foot and, despite Athena-esque efforts, couldn’t recover in time for departure.
If you ask her about the episode, she’ll downplay the coincidence. “Fractures happen,” she likes to say.
To which I say, “Especially if you don’t take care of your feet!”
If you take a lesson in foot care from anyone, take it from Emma. I once heard her say that “teaching is travel.” I think she meant metaphorically, the transfer of knowledge leading to the transformation of minds, that sort of thing. But any parent who’s ever volunteered to assist in their child’s classroom has witnessed firsthand the reason that teachers are a pedometer’s kryptonite.
Emma never sits down. She paces the front of the classroom, walks the hallways to and from lunch and recess and phys ed, squats desk-side for one-on-one moments with her students, but almost never places her butt on a chair.
Of all our friends, Emma demonstrated the most innate wisdom about her feet. The day she stood at the front of the conference room guiding Carolina and me through our new employee orientation, she wore a pair of brown Mary Janes I’d last seen in a sepia-toned photograph of my grandmother. Low and practical, they struck me as the white cotton panties of the shoe world. Hardly sexy, but what girl doesn’t want a pair?
Late ’90s shoe fashion meant chunky platforms, square toes, and three-inch heels. I swaddled my baby bunions in a pair of black Steve Madden block-heeled penny loafers with a one-inch platform sole. Carolina strutted back and forth to work in a pair of Via Spiga snakeskin peep-toe block pumps. Andi slipped on a pair of strappy red Chinese Laundry kitten-heeled sandals after work, leaving her conservative Kenneth Cole platform heels beneath her desk. Emma was all flats, all the time.
We called her Miss Frizzle and asked when her magic school bus was due to arrive.
Today, she’s the only one among us who can stand upright for an hour without complaining. All four of us had plans to take the world by storm. Decades later, Emma’s the only one still in the running to do it.
In college, I wore a button on my backpack with that iconic quote from Ginger Rogers. “I did everything Fred did, only backward and in high heels.” Such was my twenty-something version of feminism. Now, among my forty-something friends, our version of feminism is to scream at the TV whenever a cable news head compliments the former president’s former-model wife’s Louboutin’s. “WHY IS VIAGRA COVERED BY HEALTH INSURANCE BUT NOT BUNION SURGERY???”
Andi had bunion surgery at thirty-five.
In addition to Morton’s neuroma, my feet are also prone to ingrown toenails.
Carolina wages an ongoing battle with stress fractures.
Listen to me, any of you twenty-somethings reading this. Your feet won’t last as long as you think they will. Last month I bought a pair of Birkenstocks to match my favorite pair of dress pants and I wasn’t trying to be ironic.
The world will soon be yours to lead, my young friends. Stand up and make your voices heard. Future generations will look to you to stop the ozone from disappearing and keep the honeybees pollinating. Nations will rise up against each other, and you will be asked to make peace. More Boomers leave us every day, and Millennials are just hitting their stride. It’s my generation, I’m afraid, who won’t be of much help in your life-or-death crusades. We’re too busy making appointments with the podiatrist.