Confessions of a Shoe Pervert

I sort of hate the whole "women love shoes" trend that's been foisted upon us. I'm going to blame Sex and the City. It made women feel like they should love shoes, and it made men think that any woman who owned more than 3 pairs was a Carrie.

And the thing is, I have heard many a woman declare "I love shoes" while wearing evidence to the contrary on her feet. In fact, the shoes she was wearing might be evidence of having given up, or of something she found on sale at Giant Tiger after Octo-Mom picked through the bin, of something worn for comfort and bunion-support rather than fashion. But of "love of shoes"? No.

So I kind of hate that I myself feel a definite pull toward shoes. I really wish I didn't, but I always have. Even as a little girl, I'd refuse to play Barbies with my sisters unless my Barbie had shoes. Now, only someone who was once herself a little girl would understand this: every Barbie comes with shoes. Pretty high-heeled shoes, necessarily, because her feet are molded in an upward arch that will only accomodate very high heels. But those shoes are teeny tiny and they get lost about ten seconds after you open the box. So even in our house of 4 girls and probably 200 Barbies (no joke), you'd have to search forever and be lucky to come up with a single pair. So before any Barbie playing could commence, my sisters would oblige my demand and spend probably 30 minutes to find me one pair. One stinkin pair. And every other Barbie went through life barefoot.

Fast forward to high school, which for me, was in the 90s. Ugh. So many regrets. Platform Candies. Cowhide. Those stupid shoes that were like cowboy boots but without the leg. Patent leather MC Hammer shoes. 90210 hightops. Oh yeah. And, embarrassingly, shoes that my friend Kelly once declared were "so ugly they're kinda cool" as if that was the point, although up to that moment I'd seen only the cool and none of the ugly. But with that one comment I could suddenly see them for their brown orthopedic gender-neutral ugliness.

Now I have money and taste (I think. I hope.). And closets full of shoes. Three closets, and still my shoes bleed all over my house. Both my car and Sean's have pairs of my shoes in the trunk, and in the backseat (it's hard to drive in heels!). I have shoes in the garage. Shoes in my gym bag. Shoes at work. I have shoes in various animal prints. Shoes that have equal parts neon and bad-assness. Shoes that are glitter AND gold. Shoes so high that my nose bleeds. Okay, no it doesn't. But I do have tonnes of very tall shoes. I have a very tall husband, and still he has to stoop to kiss me. And I hate myself for the excess, even as I get a little thrill in my down-south parts just to try on a new pair.

And my poor feet. I've been very hard on my feet, which were shoe-resistant from the start. I have horrendously flat feet. I'll never have to go to war, but I also can't do anything without having extreme pain in my poor little tootsies. Like, crazy pain. It's absurd even to me that a lack of arches could cause such profound pain, but it's true. Add to that a terrible fall down a flight of stairs wherein I managed to sprain my foot in 3 different place, and then take off for Vegas just a few days later, leaving my crutches behind at the Bellagio because the casino floors just don't have a lot of room for disabilities (although they got me through airports like nobody's business). So needless to say the foot didn't heal. In fact, after a night of quite literally dragging it behind me as we made our frenzied way up and down the strip, I had to buy a pair of soft near-slippers, because my foot had swollen so much that my ballet flats had cut a ring all the way around my foot, I had this perfect bloody halo that was starting to look infected, and the congealed blood was starting to stick in the wrong places, and give me blisters. But I went back to the hotel that night to ice my foot in order to cram it into sky-high sparkly shoes because we renewed our vows at the Graceland Chapel and a girl cannot get married in flats. It's a sin. So that foot is now misshapen. Small price to pay, right?

And then I had a bike accident that resprained that foot and the truth is, it's now more of a club than a foot. It gets me around, but barely. My foot is somehow hump-backed. So most of the shoes in my closet, all those purchased pre-foot-deformity, don't really fit. So I have to force the bones of my foot to reconfigure in order to jam the shoes on. And then I sweat and swear and send up mental SOS flares all night long, deeply regretting my choices, but never ever making the right one because the outfit looks so much better, not to mention my legs, when I wear the crazy heels.

Yup. I really, really hate this about myself.