In My Mother's Voice

It's a truism you hear a lot when you become a parent, that at some point you will hear yourself speaking in your mother's voice. Usually this means saying something that you found hurtful as a child and swore you would never say to your own kids. But for me, it took a very different form recently.

My mom grew up rural working poor. Feedsack dresses, her mother killing chickens for dinner, two bedrooms for eight or more people, three kids per bed, something like 15 kids in her grade at school. Some of her childhood stories are like something out of Little House on the Prairie: two walnuts, an orange, and a pencil in each kid's Christmas stocking. Maybe a new penny in the toe. Maybe I made up the penny.

And every year, one pair of shoes. They ordered them from a catalog; it was some kind of program to provide shoes to poor children. Every year, the shoes were too big the first half of the year, and too small the rest of the year, and they probably didn't get worn at all around home in the summer (Do I really remember my mother telling me something when I was a kid about how good warm manure felt between your toes on a chilly morning...and thinking, "Oh, god, ewww, I'm so glad Dad is an engineer at GM and there are no cows here"?).

Anyway, the catalog shoes were never great. Whatever passed for fashionable footwear among 9-year-old girls in South Lyon, Michigan, in 1942, you can be sure that the best the catalog had to offer was not it. But there was this one year that the shoes my mom picked had run out by the time her family's order was processed, and the company sent The Most Hideous Shoes In The History of the World in their place. I don't know how many details my mother really gave me, and how much I made up a picture in my head, but they were black, and thick-soled, and they came up over her ankles, and they were heavy and hard to walk in. And she had no choice but to wear them, too big the first half of the year and too small the second half, because those were the shoes there were and there was no way to get another pair.

My mom is a good storyteller. She can tell stories from her family that will simultaneously break your heart and have you laughing so hard the tears roll down your face. She has this amazing gift for seeing the humor in a situation while it's happening. Those thing that happen where people say, "Someday we'll laugh about this"? She starts laughing right in the middle of it.

But she has told me the story of these shoes many times, and there is never anything funny about them. They were horrible for her, a daily humiliation, and I think a symbol of everything that was hard and painful about her life growing up. Even in her 70s, when she tells this story, you can see how hurt she still is for the little girl she was.

So, the other week I take Carl over to Playmakers to get a new pair of sneakers because he has worn his old pair to treadless rags. The clerk measures his feet, and he chooses a few pairs to try on, and after running around in various shoes for a few minutes, he finds some he likes, that don't slip off his heels when he runs, and he says he'd like to take that pair home.

OK, I say. We'll take these.

The clerk says, "Would you like to go up a half-size, so he can get more wear out of them?"

And I say, not sharply but more firmly than I mean to, "Absolutely not. Children should have shoes that fit properly."

The clerk holds up her hands placatingly, "OK, OK, that's fine. It's just a lot of parents like to do that..."

I say, "How can he run in shoes that don't fit right? If he outgrows them halfway through the summer, we'll buy another pair."

I hadn't realized I had such a strong opinion about Shoes, For Children, Importance of Proper Fit Thereof. But it turns out I do, and it's because I've heard this story from my mom so many times, starting when I was probably three and most recently at the age of 42 or 43. I don't really care that some parents buy shoes a half-size up, and I doubt it would scar Carl for life if I'd done that with his new sneakers. But my mom, or the humiliated little girl with horrible shoes that she was almost 70 years ago, cares. She'd have loved to choose her own shoes, to have someone measure her feet to make sure they fit properly. She got catalog shoes instead, and no sympathy at all.

I think it might have been her voice speaking through me at Playmakers. That girl my mother was. Carl, cheerful, oblivious, accustomed his whole life to shoes he likes that fit him: he doesn't need an advocate. But he has one anyway.