A couple weeks ago I shopped for sandals on sale at an island boutique. Shoe shopping is a sensitive experience for me. If I had a list of body parts I’d want to exchange, my feet would be near the top of the list. I’ve always felt I must be related to Ronald McDonald somewhere in my gene pool. I even had a pair of red shoes at one point…before I realized the resemblance…
My feet are long and wide. I can sometimes be larger than a size 10, which most stores don’t carry. And the shape of my foot limits which type of shoe I can wear.
The store clerk offered to bring me other shoes from the display as I was trying on various pairs with the girls watching me.
However, I pointed out to the store clerk that certain styles didn’t fit me well. “It’s the way my feet were made, ” I sighed, looking at a cute pair I wished I could slip on easily.
“It’s the way God made you,” Michaela bubbled.
From the mouths of babes. Later that night, I told Ted what she had said at the store. Talking about events of the day lead into a conversation of our life as a family.
Searching for shoes, I realized, was an illustration. I wish I could wear every pair. We want to live in a one-size fits all world. People like to look and be the same. But God hasn’t created us for conformity. We are all different. My feet are can only wear a certain size and style of shoe. Of the many I tried, one pair in the store fit well enough to take home.
Raising our children is a process of finding the shoe that fits their feet. Or rather it’s a process of seeing the size and shape of their feet as they grow, and helping them discover what works for each one of them. Trying on pairs and finding the right fit. There is something special that will fit each girl. Together Ted and I hope we can discover the Angel in the Marble so to speak for each daughter, to release in her the person God has made her to be, whoever that is, whether or not it fits into many styles, types or stereotypes…
Last week I began to see my feet from another angle.
In my new sandals, they seemed graceful.
And I became grateful for big feet and for little voices.
Note:
the picture above is Elisabeth using Abigail’s shoes to imitate me in my sandals.
Another recent Michaela quote I like: “When you’re growing in the tummy, God’s working on you.”
4 responses so far ↓
1 Janelle // Aug 6, 2004 at 11:39 am
cute shoes!
Your children sound adorable. They always say things that sound so profound, don’t they?
2 Katherine // Aug 6, 2004 at 9:01 pm
I’m size 10 wide too. My kids both have wide feet too. Just think, we have a good stable base to hold us up 🙂 I also have flat feet and am bow-legged (or so says my podiatrist). I can only wear shoes that fit my special orthotics (to prevent further knee surgery and getting my hips and knees out of whack). My mother-in-law told me about 11 years ago that I have beautiful feet and there’s no reason to hide them 🙂 What a great woman, eh?
3 philippe // Aug 8, 2004 at 9:15 am
Hello Julie! Just wanted to tell you about the segment I heard on NPR this morning about bloggers:
http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/feature_3835620.html
Keep on walking and blogging!
4 Lisa Williams // Aug 9, 2004 at 9:56 pm
I love the Hello Kitty sandals. I think everybody feels funny about some part of their body. Post kids, the area from about one inch above my navel down looks a bit like deflated bread dough — weird, pasty, rumply.
I can’t find a link to it, but in her concert film, Notorious C.H.O, Margaret Cho has a little poem about her body that runs over the credits that includes the lines:
My body is mine/
mine to take me around the block
After hearing that I started to try to relate to my body as if it were my old ’93 Honda Civic, which I had a lot of affection for, even if it did have a lot of dents. I liked it because it did good stuff for me.