Today I walked down the street with pride, occasionally glancing down at the miraculous flashes of red on the grey pavement below. The bounce in my step was like Carrie Bradshaw on an Upper East Side street wearing new Christian Louboutins. Boarding my Dart as the carriage doors opened, I imagined cheers from fellow passengers.
The flash of red wasn’t the sole of my high heels, but the coloured leather of a flat pair of Mary Janes. I still dream of childhood shoes like this from the Clarks section of my local Shaws department store. The miracle? I have finally found a pair of pretty shoes that fit my enormous, wide “unwomanly” feet.
Growing up as a girl with big feet, the role models didn’t help. We all laughed with glee when the Ugly Sisters tried (and failed) to squeeze into Cinderella’s glass slipper. We quivered at Roald Dahl’s square-footed Witches who squeezed their toeless feet into pointy shoes. Recently in Disneyland Paris I saw little girls hobbling around in their dainty, glittery Elsa shoes.
For my two big-footed little sons, their growing shoe sizes dwarfing those of their friends are a confidence boost. Yet for little girls with big feet, the feeling of not quite meeting the standard befitting a woman takes hold.
In Sex and the City, Carrie once said she spent $40,000 on shoes: “I like my money where I can see it, hanging in my closet.” Up until this glorious day my shoe “wardrobe” consisted of black men’s runners, Crocs and various ill-fitting footwear that would quickly land me in the physio’s office.
Since I was a teen, I’ve had the same look from shoe salespeople more times than I have toes, when I say the words: “Do you have a size eight?” Their mouth raises in the corner, their brow furrows. Whether it’s disdain or sympathy, it makes me grateful for the coldness of internet shopping. Some will shake their heads. Others bring out a 7½ to see if I can magically “squeeze in”. Occasionally they emerge proudly gripping a size 42 box as if it contained the third secret of Fatima.
And then came pregnancy. The lasting impact of motherhood on a woman’s feet feels like (yet another) of those little-talked-about topics in that long and secret book Things Women Silently Endure.
So many times I have quietly told a friend or colleague: “My feet went up a size after having kids.” “God, so did mine,” they will say, as if we are celestial twins with the same weird symptom.
It seems that for many women, pregnancy permanently changes the size and shape of their feet. A University of Iowa study found that for about two-thirds of women, their feet stayed wider and longer after pregnancy. Hormonal changes and the flattening of arches can mean a 2-5mm increase in length (that’s up to one whole shoe size), it found.
Which explains why, perfectly paired with the post-partum leggings, we have the Mammy runners.
As with many things talked about only in the shadows, a large dollop of shame accompanies bigger feet.
It’s as if no longer squeezing into those strappy sandals you wore in your 20s is a symptom of “giving up”.
Maybe I don’t need to feel like Cinderella or Elsa
My ever-stylish late mother always told me the shoes maketh the outfit. I often wondered what she would have made of the clunky black extra wide men’s runners in size 9½ that became my staple.
The shoes that meant I could walk my babies for their naps up and down Dún Laoghaire pier every day of maternity leave. The shoes that helped me to heal from a planter fascia injury after racing my children around the old Olympic running track while on holiday in Athens. For summers on the beach, those shoes became Crocs (thanks to Gen Z for making them almost acceptable again).
I wore those black runners to the doctor’s office a few months ago. My hair was straightened. I’d paired a pretty wrap dress with bright pink tights. I capped off the look with a chunky pair of Brooks men’s shoes. They act as an alarm call to the beholder: “This woman has no idea how to dress.”
“Have you got big feet?” my doctor asked, as I lay down (not for a foot exam I should add). The directness of her words made me shudder. But they also brought a surprising exhale of relief through my body. My Yeti (Big Foot) secret was out in the open. I babbled about having no choice. It was physiology, shoe-industry discrimination. But it was not one of a woman’s worst sins: bad taste or giving up.
Feeling empowered by my outing as a Yeti, I was spurred again to try to find nice shoes. And thanks to a Reddit thread of other perplexed, big-footed women, I found them. Shoes that come in all sizes and many colours. They even have the foot-shape of women like me in their name. Duckfeet. And so they came, shipped from Denmark. Beautifully packaged in a box with a leather handle. For a moment feeling like Carrie in her brownstone apartment, a squirm of anticipation overcame me as I opened the box.
When I typed the name of these Duckfeet shoes in a text to a friend about my exciting discovery, my phone auto-corrected to another word, beginning with F. It is, I now feel, an appropriate word. Feck it anyway. We hear about the body positivity movement. Perhaps we need to do the same for feet. Maybe I don’t need to feel like Cinderella or Elsa. Maybe I’ll just be sure-footed, standing on my own two feet, happy being me.
