Worse Than Sneakers

Until recently I did not own a pair of sneakers. I don’t mean running shoes, the kind of bright white shoes with three inches of foam cushion that you wear to the gym. I mean hipster sneakers. Those things that are sort of a cross between grownup shoes and athletic wear, typically involving Velcro and fake laces or no laces at all. Or ironic sneakers – you know, those shoes that are a throwback to the seventies like Top Siders or Keds or retro Adidas – I didn’t own any of those either. Mostly because of something that happened to me in France when I was thirteen, which I realize is a stupid reason, but sometimes those childhood scars are hard to shake.

When I was 13 my family moved from Connecticut to Paris for the year. I packed up all the clothes that had been required of my Connecticut existence – my puffy CB ski jacket with the requisite ski resort tags hanging off the zipper, my Benetton rugby shirt, and my Reebok sneakers. I promised my friends I would bring them all back highly coveted pairs of Guess jeans – since they said Paris right on the label I imagined there would be a Guess factory probably across the street from my house where I could scoop up dozens of jeans for five dollars. It was the eighties. The dollar was strong and the franc was weak – it didn’t seem THAT unreasonable.

On my first day of school, I was shocked to discover that French teenagers were not dressed exclusively in Guess jeans. In fact, they’d never heard of Guess, which it turned out was an American brand. They also were not wearing Benetton rugby shirts, and they were most definitely not wearing ski jackets of any kind. Over the first few months of my Parisian life I did a complete wardrobe overhaul. I bought the kind of jeans everyone was wearing, a brand whose name I have long since forgotten. I stocked up on Ton Sur Ton and Naf Naf shirts. I bought a long black wool coat and pinned a rhinestone rose to the lapel. I started feeling like maybe I could pull off the French teenager look. Also I learned to speak passable French, which helped.

Then one day I was hanging out with a group of girls during a break in between classes. Several of the girls in my class had heartily embraced a sort of Euro-punk look, which mostly involved spiky hair and heavy smoking. At the forefront of the trend was a girl with bangs that stood directly at a 45-degree angle from her head. The only conceivable way I could imagine her achieving this effect was if she had her own personal wind tunnel at home. I pictured her standing in front of the wind tunnel every morning with an aerosol can of industrial-strength hairspray, then measuring her bangs with a protractor to make sure the angle was right.

“I like your clothes,” Wind Tunnel said to me, taking a drag off her cigarette. “But you still look like an American.”

“I do?” I asked, horrified. She hadn’t meant it as a compliment. She meant that I was barely distinguishable from the Americans in shorts and Hard Rock Café t-shirts who stood across from the Louvre complaining loudly that they couldn’t get a decent cheeseburger.

“You can tell because you’re wearing sneakers,” she said, then took a deep drag off her cigarette as if to say that no more discussion on the subject was necessary.

I stared in horror at my feet. How had I not noticed that no one else worse sneakers? Probably because it was not in my realm of consciousness that teenagers might wear any other type of shoe. Kids in my school back in Connecticut weren’t going to class in heels or mules or stilettos. They wore sneakers or L.L. Bean duck boots. Those were the choices, as far as I knew. That afternoon I went out and bought a pair of black lace-up shoes. I hid my Reeboks at the back of my closet and swore I would never wear sneakers again.

I stuck by my pledge long after my family had returned to Connecticut, long after I’d gone off to college, long after those half-sneaker-half-shoe things that everyone wears now became fashionable. I refused to wear anything but shoes. Ballet flats became my signature shoe through the rest of high school, evolving into knee-high boots toward my senior year, then giving way to pointy ankle-high shoes in college.

The world has gotten smaller since the eighties, and I’m sure that French high school kids now wear sneakers. In fact, I’m sure they probably wear pretty much the same thing American high school kids wear. But not me. I couldn’t do it. I saw other thirty-somethings around me brazenly walking the streets in Pumas and Diesel sneaker-shoes. I knew that Gucci and Prada and every fancy name out there made sneakers and yet, I refused to betray my thirteen-year-old self.

And then I became a mother. Everyone told me that motherhood changes everything, but no one told me it changes your shoe choices. It didn’t for a while. I was out for a walk with the baby a few short months after he’d been born when a grandmotherly woman stopped me on the street.

“How cute,” she said, peering into the baby carriage. Then she looked at my feet. I was wearing pointy-toed leather boots.

“I remember when my first was born,” she said. “From that day on I wore comfortable shoes.”

At the time I thought the woman was a nut. Who walks over to a stranger and comments on her footwear? Then a year passed. My son grew from a baby who lay sleeping in his carriage into a toddler who needed to be within four feet of dirt at all times, preferably in dirt, and best of all in a sandbox filled with what passes for sand in New York City but what in other parts of the country would probably be categorized as toxic waste. And it quickly became apparent that going into the sandbox with him in nice shoes, or really any shoes that couldn’t be quickly hosed off, was a huge mistake.

So I broke down. I went to the shoe store and came back with two pairs of easily washable shoes. Okay, they were sneakers. The first time I put them on I felt stupid. Even though 23 years had passed since a French teenager with weird hair (who had probably long since married some guy named Jean-Luc and moved to the Paris suburbs and had lots of little Jean-Lucs, all of whom probably wear their own sneakers) had insulted my choice of footwear, I still felt the sting of her remark as I slid my new sneakers on. And then, as I looked in the mirror, I noticed something that made me feel even worse. These were not just sneakers. They were Mom Shoes. I looked over the rest of my outfit. I was wearing cargo pants, a thermal shirt layered under a t-shirt, and comfortable slip-on sneaker-like shoes. I looked like someone’s mother. I quickly went and found my husband, who was playing with our son in the living room.

“Do these look like Mom Shoes?” I asked him.

He gave me a look as though I’d just asked him if my shoes made my ass look big,.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Do these look like Dad Pants?”

I looked at his pants. He’s a graduate student and usually wears jeans, but on that day he happened to be wearing a pair of khakis.

“Sort of,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Then those look like Mom Shoes.”

“No!” I said. “Should I take them back? I mean, I needed them for the playground because I didn’t want to ruin my other shoes, they were all getting sand in them, but I feel stupid. I don’t want to be wearing sneakers and I don’t want to be wearing Mom Shoes.”

“They’re fine,” said my husband. “I don’t know what Mom Shoes are. Those look like regular shoes. If you need them for the playground then keep them.”

I kept the Mom Shoes. They’re comfortable. I can get them covered in muck and I don’t care. In some ways I’ve even started to look forward to wearing them. In the mornings when I go to my office I wear regular shoes. When I come home in the afternoon to play with my son I change into my Mom Shoes. I still feel stupid when I put them on, though. I tell myself it’s out of necessity; the world is a different place, and sneaker wearing has a different significance than it used to; there are probably people in Paris, French people, wearing sneakers by the thousands. But I can’t help it. I wear my sneakers, but I will never be comfortable in them. And I promise you this: I will never wear them to Paris.