Buying shoes with Mom

Been thinking lately about the things we want in this life and how we go about getting them.

Eldest daughter is making a major job change that involves the job itself and relocation across the country again. Middle daughter is restless in her job and has something else in the works that may or may not become an actual position with a new company. Youngest daughter has moved in with me to go to the local junior college and has major decisions ahead of her. Two of my three sons are in a state of flux right now and the third is pretty settled except for that take-every-Friday-off-without-pay-until-things-pick-up situation.

As for me, I thoroughly enjoy my job, but would go elsewhere at the drop of a dollar-filled hat. So we’re all a little up in the air these days. Nothing dramatic or traumatic, but things to think about as decisions large and small are made.

Sometimes we – my family and yours, too – choose what we want the way my mother bought shoes. She taught elementary school, but instead of dressing like a poster child for Goodwill Industries  as most of her colleagues did (and generally as a profession, still do) she arrived in her dusty rural classroom every day in a dress or suit and high heels – the narrower and higher the better. That woman couldn’t cook, but she knew how to dress.

Her shoe collection wasn’t much compared to Imelda Marcos (Google it, kids), but it was substantial and constantly in need of renewal. At least one a month, she and Dad piled my brother and me into Chevy and went to town shopping for shoes.

That was before shopping malls, so there was much walking from shoe store to shoe store all around downtown. Sometimes Dad would leave her to her shopping and get a haircut while we boys waited quietly in the barbershop chairs looking at the hunting magazines.

It was very rare for my mother to find just the right shoes. That wasn’t because she hadn’t seen every shoe in town, or because of price or the salespeople not being able to fit her correctly. She was usually disappointed because she had designed the shoe in her mind long before we left the farm that morning.

She knew the color, style, materials – everything she wanted in a pair of shoes. Anything short of that – and they almost always were – wasn’t quite right, and often was just plain unacceptable. Close, but no cigar. I can almost hear her venting to Dad in that “can you believe that?!” tone of voice, “Those are just what I’m looking for. Why on EARTH wouldn’t they make them in grey?!!”

Too often, it seems, we make life choices like Mom bought shoes. No matter how many choices are open to us, we decide before leaving the house that we want this specific career or that particular job or that location. We choose a companion according to a predetermined checklist of qualities that we think are essential (never mind that we’ve never met anyone who can score 100 percent on our test). When we discover that no one makes the shoes we’ve imagined, nothing else will fit. Like my mother, disappointment is almost a certainty.

I’m not suggesting that we settle for second-best in anything important, but we might do well to buy from what’s in stock instead of waiting all of our lives for something that never will be.