My Fantastic Feet

How I learned to love my most deplorable body part

This is part of a series where I share a tiny simple pleasure — something completely and utterly ordinary — to train my brain to look for joy. I hope you find many tiny simple pleasures, too!

My mother hated feet. In her opinion, it was acceptable that they existed, but unless sleeping or showering they should be tucked away, hidden from the world inside a nice pair of shoes. Definitely not flip flops or sandals.

When I was very young, maybe five, hearing her complain about feet so frequently made me suspect that I was somewhat disgusting, being the unwitting owner of two of them. I am sure my mother’s foot-hatred did not extend to the chubby feet of her three children, but still, I was concerned. Enough to keep my socks on when inside the house, just in case the sight of them would make her love me slightly less.

As a young woman, I was fascinated whenever I saw celebrities pose on glossy magazine covers sans-shoes, often in fancy ball gowns, draping themselves seductively over a chair. “They give no fucks!” I would think, often wishing I could achieve a similar level of bold and somewhat disconcerting confidence. I mean, imagine proudly displaying your most deplorable body part?

When I became a mother myself, things shifted. My son was a fat, fleshy baby with wide brown eyes and a hearty laugh that rose deep from his belly. I couldn’t help but adore his pink cherub feet, holding them in my hands and sniffing them as he cooed on the floor, as though trying to absorb every atom of him into myself.

Perhaps because of him I have become more accepting of my own two feet. Slowly, but with certainty, I have decided that I actually quite like them. They help me remember to be grateful for inhabiting this perfectly imperfect body, as my feet touch the earth, as the earth diligently spins 67,000 miles per hour around the sun.

The other day I was in the backyard reading (completely alone – my favourite activity), when for no reason (other than I felt like it), I took off my shoes and felt the grass beneath my feet. I found myself thinking: Yes, this is it. This is what it’s all about. By which I meant that “feet to earth” represents the whole shebang, the whole point of life.

We are temporary, tiny aspects of the universe. We start off with specific circumstances, in a certain part of the world, with a set of parents we love, loathe or tolerate, and from there we set off — co-creating our own lives, ruled half by whatever’s happening around us (the earth) and half by our own choices (the feet). 

Life is fleeting; seventy-three years for the average human, fifty for my foot-hating but lovely mother. I wonder if we expect too much from it, and forget that it's nothing but a brief, bewildering experience. The interplay of feet to earth; my choices meeting my circumstances.