Sole Searching: How My Grandmother’s Shoe Obsession Quelled My Identity Crisis
It has been her who I should have been looking to for this all along
My father recently tasked me with editing a series of essays written by my grandmother, his mother, who is not only alive at 97 years old, but still showing up to her bi-weekly standing nail appointments. Most of these were written some time around the age of 80 when she had signed up to take a writing class on a whim. She didn’t necessarily aspire to be a writer as I have, but rather wanted to document certain events from the substantial life she had lived.
As a little girl, one of my favorite things to do was to riffle through my Nana’s diaries which she had graciously gifted to me. Before bed each night I would open one of the small, leather-bound books, its pages thin and nearly translucent, her tiny cursive scrawl meticulous in blue ink across them. Most of these entries were written as a post-Depression teenager of the 1940s in California and her daily activities weren’t particularly insightful or exciting. In fact, it could be argued that many of them were rather uneventful, even boring. But I loved burying my nose into her books, breathing her in, imagining a life when I myself would one day be a teenager.
Despite being of an older generation, my grandmother has relentlessly supported my non-traditional path and lifestyle. She never questioned my decision to forego college or to pursue a career in the arts or to not have any children of my own. For a woman who was raised in a very different time, she is incredibly progressive and open-minded.
It could be argued, that my grandmother is technically the only surviving woman in my life whom I share a bloodline with other than my sister. I have been estranged from my mother for nearly five years now, which in some ways feels like a grueling eternity, and in others, a blissful respite that’s passed in the blink of an eye. My grandmother on my mother’s side passed away while I was in high school, and my mother’s sister, my aunt, before I was born. I’ve often wondered about that aunt and the ways in which my mother’s and my own life could have taken shape differently had she been alive.
And in picking up the pieces of my past with my mother, I’ve examined her closely, often looking for evidence of the ways in which I’m similar to her or not. Most of the time, I’m hoping to find the latter. As a woman in her thirties, it seems as though I’m constantly seeking some piece of the outer world to show me who I am. I joke frequently about having “mommy issues” and I have very few female friends, something that has become both increasingly difficult and also necessary as I’ve gotten older.
I am fearful of becoming my mother in the ways that most daughters are, only to an exacerbated extent seeing as she is a narcissist and an alcoholic. And for this reason, I am keeping constant tabs on myself to be sure I am veering away from any behaviors that might remotely resemble her. I am on edge, high alert, the way she raised me to be around her, always attempting to be attuned to her various moods and levels of intoxication.
As a child, I looked to my mother for cues as most of us do. How is a woman supposed to be? How should she act? What should she wear? How should she carry herself? These were all questions I needed answers to and I observed my mother with keen interest to try to understand how I was meant to blossom into my own version of a fully-formed girl.
But later in life, approaching early adulthood, I watched as she unraveled entirely in the throes of addiction and I began to doubt the ways in which I had spent my formative years emulating her. I attempted to extricate myself from her conditioning, an impossible endeavor for any daughter it seems to me, and I sought out ways to become myself based on other women around me. But none of them were family. So often, we are looking for some sense of ourselves to be confirmed by someone we came from, who came before us. Someone who paved a path that we can follow and use as a roadmap.
Which is why it strikes me as I’m sifting through the writings of my nearly centenarian grandmother, that it has been her who I should have been looking to for this all along. My identity has been so contingent on being my mother’s daughter, the child of an alcoholic, something I didn’t sign up to be and spent years avoiding admission of.
My mother has always been a mystery to me. And not just in the way that parents can be elusive when we’re children, only to have them come more fully into focus for who they are as people as we grow up. There is so much about her that I don’t know or understand and that I likely never will. A compulsive liar and addict, which are really two in and of the same, I can’t trust her to be a reliable narrator of her own life and upbringing. And beyond that, I have no one to corroborate these stories with even if I wanted to. With no surviving family members, other than her four estranged children, there is no one I can seek out to confirm anything my mother has ever told me.
I have long felt motherless which is something I am facing and learning to cope with daily. It doesn’t define me or make me inferior in the ways that I used to fear it might. But it is an enduring part of who I am. Determined to live out the cliché of not becoming my mother, I have had to pave my own path without an older sister or aunt or even cousin to look to for reference.
And then there is Rosaline Fox, my grandmother. A woman. A woman who has been there all along but whom I’ve never sought out any reflection of myself in. And as I read through these essays of hers, which aren’t the most poignantly written but full of facts of my family which I never realized, I see something fascinating. Or rather, someone. And that’s myself.
It’s a revelation that makes me want to fall to my knees with relief. Here is a woman who I am a part of. Whose very life and life choices led to my existence. There is so much within these pages that I am almost ashamed I didn’t know. So much family history, so many interesting insights, so many people with whom she has forged relationships with over the years.
Having stood at 5'1” her whole life, her petite frame has shrunken significantly with age. I tower over her, a feeling I don’t often experience as I share her short stature, and when I hug her I have to be sure to squeeze gently enough that I don’t crush her frail little bones. In my search to find who I am, she was such an unlikely, but obvious, suspect.
Of all of the things to stop me in my tracks, it was an essay about shoes, titled “The Shoe Goddess.” I realize this may seem trivial. But something about the way she talks about the various shoes she has purchased and owned is what causes my breath to catch in my throat. It’s not a genetic trait, of course, to have an obsession with shoes. Most could even argue that it’s not unique enough to be considered any kind of thread of connection. And yet, to me, it is.
She describes all of the pairs she’s purchased over the years, “pointed toes, square toes, toeless, platform, sling pumps, regular pumps and every style and color shoe you can imagine.” She writes about the way in which her husband, my grandfather who passed away when I was six, teased her about her shoe collection. Women and their shoes! But to me, I see a spark of something in her words which I recognize as my own.
I see the same shoe-hoarding woman when I look in the mirror and I don’t feel a flash of shame but instead, a silly sense of pride. This feeling, so foreign to me, rolls around in my stomach like a load of clean laundry in a dryer. It tumbles and twirls. I wait for it to settle but it continues on just like that. A cyclical feeling of unfamiliarity that is comforting and strange all at once.
I am learning to welcome all of the parts of myself and instead of seeking the thread of who they may be connected to, allowing myself to have the experience of autonomy. I am a multitude of things collected from various women, some of which I’ve gained from my mother, some from my grandmother “the shoe goddess”, and some that are mine and mine alone.
