The black shoe saga

It started a couple of weeks ago. I was getting ready for church one very early Sunday morning. That day I would be doing a lot of backstage work (including set moving) and thought maybe I should dig out a pair of nice, sturdy comfy black lace-up shoes (as opposed to my usual clogs which sometimes fall off when I'm dashing around). I remembered that I had a cute pair of black suede lug sole sneakers which I'd gotten back in the 90's when a friend of mine was working in a shoe store. Hadn't worn 'em in a while since it's easier to have slip on shoes when you're a mom with little kids. After a bit of digging around on the closet floor I found one them, and was getting ready to tear the closet apart looking for the other. Then it occurred to me perhaps I should slip the shoe on that I had to see if it would be comfy for running around all day.

Well.....

Not only was it not comfy, it was so tight I could barely stand in it. I used to wear these shoes to work when I worked in a bookstore on my feet all day, and now I couldn't even stand to tie the laces. Yikes! So this is what they meant about a woman's feet growing with each pregnancy. I thought they were exaggerating, but it obviously crept up on me unawares.

How could it creep up unawares, you ask? Well, since for about 8 of my years in the work force I worked in retail, most of my shoe wardrobe before children was various sorts of pumps, flats, loafers, and boots - all on the rather dressy side. I bought a couple pair of comfy clogs after our first child was born and wore them till they pretty much fell apart. For a while I'd pick up a pair here and there as needed, from somewhere inexpensive like Payless or Walmart. The problem I've discovered recently with that is my feet won't tolerate cheap shoes anymore.

I figured it was time to actually make the effort and go to a real shoe store and invest in a pair of decent black shoes that I could walk around in without hurting my feet. (I've got 2 or 3 pair that look just fine but kill my feet if I walk around a bunch.)

Now I'll let you in on a little secret. I must be the only woman in America who hates shoe shopping. I don't know why, but from the time I was a little girl, my feet have always been hard to fit. When I was little, it was because my feet were really small and slender so all the shoes were too wide.

But now? I used to wear a size 5 or 6 when I was in high school. The shoes I just bought are an 8 1/2. Do you really mean to tell me my feet have grown 3 1/2 sizes just from pregnancy? That's a shoe size a child! Thank goodness I didn't decide I wanted a dozen or so children or by now I'd be wearing the shoe boxes.

Or is something else going on here? My dad used to tell me stories from his various other jobs he had before I was born. One of the places he worked as a time study engineer was a shoe factory. He used to talk about how very carefully each part of the shoe was crafted, how it was measured up exactly against the proper size shoe last (the 3-D form). And how all the shoe sizes for all the factories were standardized to those same lasts. A woman could walk into a shoe store and ask for her size in any style shoe and it would fit.

My mom and I have similar size feet. Between us we have had shoes over the last 20 years in sizes ranging from 5 to 8 1/2. Have her feet grown 3 sizes too? Me, I think that shoe sizes have become more like food label portion sizes - a recommendation only. An average. Otherwise how can you explain that when I go shoe shopping I need to start at my actual size with the understanding of going up or down as much as a size and a half either way?

And I'd really like to know if anyone test drives some of these shoe styles on actual feet. Some of the shoes they're making for ladies these days don't even stay on your feet long enough to walk to the mirror, let alone around town. Maybe you're just supposed to stand around and look fabulous in them. I must have tried on a hundred pairs of shoes today. Only 10 or so were worth doing a test walk - only 5 could I actually consider wearing all day. Do most of the women I see around town actually find these shoes comfortable? Or do their feet suffer their vanity? I used to be able to do that, but I can't anymore. It's one thing to stand all day in pumps that slightly pinch. It's quite another to grocery shop and chase a toddler in less than comfortable shoes.

About 3 hours and 100 pairs later, I finally found 2 pair worth taking home. The new ones are an 8 and an 8 1/2. The ones I wore to go shopping are a 7 1/2. Go figure...