When Bad Moms Wear Good Shoes

I decided not to duct tape my shoes.  Not because I didn’t think it would look good.  Primarily because of an incident that occurred several years ago around the 4th of July.  That was back during the time when Dimples somewhat let me select her outfits, and I was determined to have a cute Independence Day ensemble for her to wear, but Old Navy refused to cooperate.  (Because I was shopping in July.  If I had had the foresight to shop for the 4th of July  the day after Valentine’s Day, I would have had a huge inventory from which to choose, I am sure.)  By the time I realized June had ended, and the holiday was fast-approaching, the only footwear left at Old Navy was blue and red flip flops with yellow and purple paint splotches all over the soles.

So, I got out some red paint that I used for scrapbooking, covered up the unpatriotic colors, let the paint dry for 24-hours, and Dimples was perfectly accessorized for the Celebration of the Birth of Our Great Nation.

And then we went out in the real world of San Antonio, where the heat and humidity and the sweat on my daughter’s feet became the perfect chemical combination to bare her mother’s idiotic quest for perfection to the entire world in the form of red feet.  And somehow the coloring started to creep up the tops of her feet, which made her look like a piece of celery in a science experiment gone very wrong.

Anyway, so I learned my lesson about modifying footwear.  Which is, Don’t – Because Something Embarrassing Will Happen.  To Me.  Even if It’s Not My Footwear.

There is an addendum to that rule, however.  You can modify footwear when something embarrassing has already happened, and you are trying to Prevent it From Getting Worse.  This is best exemplified by the time that Dimples’ flip-flop broke at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter – a place that has an overabundance of wizard wands and chocolate frogs, but no Payless Shoes kiosks.  In that instance, I took my cloth belt off my shorts, pulled one end through the hole in her flip flop, the other end through the other side, and wrapped it like a thong around her leg.

In retrospect, that was probably not less embarrassing than hopping around in one flip-flop, and I really wish I had taken a picture of my innovative solution for that problem.

So, regarding my great Shoe Dilemma in yesterday’s post (which was really written over a week ago), I’m afraid this is going to be very anti-climactic.  I feel compelled to finish up the shoe story, because some of you asked.  To be honest, though, the shoe story is one of those stories that should just remain incomplete because, really, it ended very undramatically.  In fact, I probably shouldn’t even have started the story in the first place.  Lesson learned.

So, I did not duct tape my shoes for Harvard, because I was afraid of the embarrassing consequences.  Instead, I wore one of my new pairs of sensible shoes on the first day.  Big mistake.  They cut the crap out of my big toes, leaving me with sizable chunks of flesh carved out right underneath each cuticle.

I wore black flip-flops the rest of the time.  And Harvard did not expel me.  For my comfortable shoes, my ugly toes, or my stupidity.

Insensibly Torturous Shoes

 

Advertisement