After more years than I care to count, my mother still talks about the little girl I was. About how I didn’t like to get my hands dirty (don’t bother to invite me on a camping trip) and how I’d constantly come in from playing to make sure she was still there.
But it’s mostly about the shoes, and how, by the age of 2, I had more pairs than she did — and about the one pair I just had to have.
I was 3 or 4, and we were on a shopping trip with my grandma, who into her 90s would still light up when talk turned to high heels. Then I spied them — a pair of T-strap tennies with fine rainbow-colored stripes. My mother told me several times that I didn’t need more shoes and tried to get me to leave. It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t budge, and she finally relented.
I remember those shoes. They were stylish and classy. (Those words may not have been in my vocabulary yet, but I knew style when I saw it, and I knew what I liked).
I imagined I would have a daughter, and that she would look and act like me and love to shop, especially for shoes. When Elizabeth, my adopted daughter, arrived, she was a smiling, outgoing 13-month-old just learning to walk — a tall, blue-eyed blonde who looked just like my husband. I wondered what we might have in common and how we would connect. We had so much to learn about each other.
One of our first outings was a mother-daughter shopping trip where I spotted a pair of pink T-strap tennies with delicate, white embroidered flowers. Elizabeth reached for them as I slipped them on her feet, and then stretched out her legs to admire them. As I pushed the stroller out of the store, she bent her right leg and put her foot in the crook of her left arm, and started patting the shoe and cooing to it, then rested her cheek on it.
She didn’t like dirt on her hands either. Or those temporary tattoos or ink stamps. And when the day’s art project in our parent-toddler class was turkey handprints, she wrinkled her nose as the kids painted their palms and fingers to make brightly colored turkeys — we left class without an art project. One afternoon at my grandma’s, she poked her head around the corner, and my grandma said, “Look, she’s checking on her mommy just like you used to do.”
It took much longer and happened under different circumstances than I had imagined, but somehow we managed to find each other.
On one of our shopping trips when she was 3, I saw a pair of lavender suede slip-ons with delicate pink flowers on the sides. “Look how pretty these are,” I said holding them up.
“I need down,” Elizabeth said, trying to get out of her stroller. She had already spotted her own pair. “Dora,” she said pointing to a pair of zip-up tennis shoes displaying one of her favorite cartoon characters.
“But don’t you think these are prettier?” I asked.
“No, Dora and Boots,” Elizabeth said, pointing out the added feature of Dora’s sidekick. Well, they did have lavender on them and some dainty pink flowers on the side. She stood in front of a full-length mirror, twisting one way and then the other and lifting her heel to see how they looked.
I made one last attempt. “How about just trying these on to see how they look?” I asked.
“No. Dora,” she said firmly.
What could I say? Sometimes when the right shoes are calling, a girl’s just gotta have ’em.
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