Today is exactly three weeks after Mother’s Day, and three weeks before Father’s Day.
I wonder why I’ve never noticed this phenomenon before – a single Sunday, every year, perfectly equidistant between the two Hallmark holidays. I can’t help but think about how I was parented, a theme I’m wrestling with as I write my book.
At age fifty-one, I need only take a short walk outside, and look down at my feet, to feel the lingering shame of one parent’s lesson from childhood, and the positive reframing of another.
As a little girl, my toes had turned inward and the left foot would sometimes catch on the right as I walked, especially when I grew tired. Dad said the best athletes, the fastest runners, were pigeon-toed like me, but Mom didn’t buy it. She thought the way I walked was a shame and needed fixing.
A square snapshot from the 70s captures me in blonde pig tails wearing my first pair of corrective orthopedic shoes – tiny white leather boots that looked and felt like stiff ice skates without blades. The awkward high-tops had hurt my feet, made them tender, but that didn’t stop me from running wild on our farm in central Iowa.
After I outgrew the high-tops, I was laced into a pair of corrective saddle shoes that I wore to kick rotten apples down the driveway, flip dead animals over with a curious toe, and unsuccessfully jump across the ditch of liquid manure runoff from the hog lot.
“You look like a street urchin,” Mom had declared one day as she marched me by the elbow to the front porch, leaving me alone on the cold concrete steps with a rag and a bottle of white Kiwi polish. Resigned, I pulled a saddle shoe off one foot, lifted the tongue, and shoved my small fist up its throat to hold it in place as I whitewashed over the pig shit and scuff marks.
Once I grew out of the saddle shoes, my feet still turned in a bit, but not enough to warrant a third pair of expensive custom orthotics. I loved the freedom of running barefoot and wiggling my toes in the cool grass of our front yard. Even my hand-me-down canvas tennies felt like heaven. But Mom was not content with my slightly imperfect feet, and without the rigid shoes to bind me, she assumed their role in my life.
Throughout my pre-teen and teenage years, Mom walked behind me at the shopping mall and in the grocery store, verbally correcting how I walked. Scrutinizing my appearance. Digging into tender places.
“Would it hurt to use some blush on your cheeks? Why don’t you wear that cute skirt from your cousin? You’re toeing in again, Becky. Straighten out that right foot,” she’d say. “It’s for your own good, you know. Don’t you want to look pretty?”
You could argue that my mom had tried to correct my appearance out of love, to help me avoid tripping through life. You might also ask why my dad never told her to knock it off. I know I do.
They were not perfect parents. I am not a perfect parent. I believe we are all doing the best we can with the tools in our toolbox. But over the years, I’ve tried to learn from this particularly rough parenting lesson, take the best parts and reject the worst, and apply it to how I parent my own kids.
Today, it’s hard to reconcile the mom of my youth with the sweet and forgetful little gray-haired lady who has Alzheimer’s now. Mom doesn’t remember all the times she body shamed me and tried to fix me. And I won’t remind her. That would be confusing to her now, and cruel. She no longer cares about keeping up appearances or perfecting the female form. She misses Dad and family. Every time I go over to the house, she just wants a hug, and I give her one. She just wants love. And so I’m making an effort to forget about past hurts, too.
So much of how children are parented (especially girls) is wrapped up in social conditioning and our culture’s intolerance of physical flaws. Mom’s generation was raised this way, and I try to cut her some slack. But that emphasis on the exterior stops with me.
My sons are adults now, but I will continue to tell them they are strong and capable. Their imperfections are their super powers. They do not require fixing.
I will also take little Becky in my arms and tell her the same. I can never tell her enough.
I refuse to bind my feet and whitewash over the pig shit anymore. I want to run around barefoot, wiggle my toes in the grass. As is. Flaws and all. And I want my kids to do the same.