Continued
A Mother's Thud
It seems some things are even more powerful than the call of fashion. Motherhood, for example. Elvia relates the following shoe-injury anecdote:
"I was trying to be cool wearing some boots with heels while carrying my son downs some stairs in the winter. Needless to say I fell on my knees so I wouldn't drop my son. Got up made sure my son was ok and then made sure my boots were ok....Never checked my knees which were bloody and torn."
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“I was in Ireland for Thanksgiving with my family and we all dressed up for the occasion. I bought these new high heeled open toed shoes (that matched my outfit perfectly by the way). However, I bought them with the intention of only having to walk from the hotel to the cab to the restaurant! WELL.....the cabs were on strike so we had to walk probably 1-2 miles, all over Dublin! I had to lean on my sister and mom for support the whole way. It was horrible. My legs were so soar the next day, I could barely walk. I swore I would throw those shoes away, but I just couldn't part with them. They were just so cute. I wore them one other time, at a party at my apartment (so I didn't have to walk anywhere), but I think they are still in my basement...just waiting to be worn again!”
It seems the lure of seeing one’s feet encased in trendy, adorable, girlish goodness is reward enough for a little casual self-mutilation. Maybe it’s because deep down all women realize what I admitted years ago: that feet are fundamentally weird-looking and were probably a lot more useful and fun when we still used them to hang upside-down from tree limbs. By choosing to wear shoes that are so fabulous they transcend comfort, women allow their feet to be as beautiful as the rest of them even while they condemn themselves to subtle foot misery. And really, what’s more girlish than that?
So is there any hope for our battered tootsies and angry ankles? Some sources recommend limiting heel height to five centimeters or less, or foregoing heels altogether. Yeah, good luck with that. The American Podiatric Medical Association has some recommendations including limiting the amount of time you spend in your fabulously painful footwear and alternating your heel height every other day. In order to do this, of course, you’ll have to buy an awful lot of shoes. This news should make some of my respondents very happy indeed.
