How Did I Not Notice My Shoes Didn't Fit?

When you've outgrown old identities without even realizing it.

It felt like sacrilege, punching the tip of the razor through the surface and ripping downward. It did not feel like something one should do to a $155 pair of running shoes. But I felt desperate. I tugged at the padding underneath the surface, pinching bits out from around the achilles. There was no going back now.

Twenty-eight months after I paused running for the first extended break of my adult life—during pregnancy—I was at my wits’ end. I’d done the postpartum physical therapy and slowly begun to jog again. I gradually added distance, added vert. I even raced. After a while, I was actually feeling stronger and faster than I had pre-pregnancy and I crossed the Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim in a day 16 months postpartum. Then things fell apart.

***

Researchers have found that happiness depends less on how well you’re doing than whether you’re doing better than you expected. But the further I get into motherhood, the more I realize expectations are funny things. Where do they actually come from? What do we base them on? Society? Family? Media? Our previous experiences?

***

The winter after the Grand Canyon trip, I bee-lined to the footwear department at the back of our local REI, dodging displays as my one-year-old lunged for the colorful water bottles and sports bras. I wanted to treat myself to a fresh pair of Blundstones, my old ones looking ragged, having already been resoled once. It would be a super quick trip, I thought. In and out—just nab the exact same thing, but new. That’s not what happened, though.

My son made a break for a rack of socks as I tried unsuccessfully to squeeze my foot into the new version of my old boot. And then also the next size up. Maybe my old ones were so stretched out, I just need to break these new ones in a bit, I thought, carrying them to the register anyway as Jay reached for a rack of energy bars from my other arm.

But the new boots never did fit. At home the next day, I tried them on again, puzzling at how the back of the boot felt so tight against my achilles. Would I have to return them for an even bigger size? The new ones already felt bizarrely big compared to the ones I’d been wearing for so many years. I held one up against the bottom of my foot for comparison—and suddenly noticed the issue: A lump the diameter of a quarter protruded from the area between my ankle bone and achilles, and the entire back of my foot was flushed with swelling. How long had it been this way? Somehow I’d been too busy and distracted with other things to even notice until that moment.

***

Before you become a parent, the only thing you have to base your expectations on is your previous life—as a nonparent. Maybe you’ve observed friends who are parents, or family members. Maybe you saw examples around you and thought, “I’ll never be like that.” Or, “I’m totally going to be this specific type of mom.” You set those expectations based on who you are as a person at that moment, with your current set of (non-parental) experiences, values and priorities.

***

I Googled. I iced. I rested. I wore only clogs or flip flops, shoes that didn't touch the bump. I took weeks off of running, barely even walking, in hopes the issue would disappear. I had signed up for the Rut Mountain Runs 50K, but four months away from the race I worried I was too messed up to train for such a punishing race. Following the lead of other runners on Reddit, I took a blade to my beloved Speedgoats, hoping that cutting out a hole for my self-diagnosed bursitis might relieve the pressure and at least allow me to keep running. (Thankfully, the act of running itself didn’t seem to bother it.) But was I going to cut up all my other shoes, too? Finally, I scheduled a PT appointment.

Sara, my physical therapist, is a 100-mile trail race champion with a finely tuned understanding of the differences between discomfort, pain and injury. I appreciate this. She explained the possible reasons for my bursitis and gave me a number of action points, including changing up my shoes or adding a riser in the heel to help avoid friction on steeper terrain. She gave me a reality check about how long it might take to get back to normal—but to my delight said I could keep running.

“Got the greenlight to run—yay!” I gushed on Strava. “But might be cutting holes in my shoes for a long time.”

I needed new running shoes, especially if I thought I might run the Rut after all. But who wants to fork over for pricey running shoes when you’re just going to cut them up?

***

There’s been a lot of talk about the power of lowering expectations in my media feed lately, particularly for mothers and fathers succumbing to burnout because we’ve bought into the idea we can “have it all.” The thought is that maybe ratcheting down our standards a notch or two could create a little more ease, save us some angst. If we don’t expect our house to be pristine or our stomachs to be flat, we won’t be disappointed when they aren’t, and so forth.

***

I’m embarrassed to say it took me more than two months following that PT appointment to get myself to a running store. I told the salesperson I needed my usual size 8, popped them on my feet for a quick try-on, and left. The shoes were different from my usual brand—my PT had said it’s good to rotate models. But a mile into the first run, I was nearly in tears. My feet ached something fierce. After hobbling home, I returned to the running store.

More than two years after giving birth, I had my feet measured. The salesperson, who was also registered to run the Rut, pulled out a pair of trail runners a full size larger than the ones I’d been wearing and said she gets new mothers in the shop all the time who have to size up postpartum. Jogging back and forth in the shop, I was aghast. The size 9 shoes felt heavenly. Pillowy cushion and no tightness anywhere. I suddenly recalled all the women from my past who’d said their feet spread with pregnancy. Why hadn’t it occurred to me that it might happen to me? At home, I tried my old ones on again for comparison. How had I not noticed how cramped they felt all this time?

The Rut went great in my size 9s. That was six months ago. My bursitis is almost completely gone, and I’m enjoying running possibly more than I ever have before. I’ve slowly been purging my closet of my too-small shoes, and sometimes it makes me sad. (How can I part with the Frye boots I bought on my first New York trip 20 years ago?) But I think of this line from photographer and writer Johnie Gall:

“I think we get stuck by feeling beholden to old versions of ourselves, like we owe them something. But all we really owe ourselves is the freedom and grace to keep becoming who we really are.”

We bring so many expectations to our lives, many of them established when we were, essentially, different people. We forget to pause and ask why we have those expectations in the first place. Maybe it’s less about lowering our standards and more about asking: Does something feel a bit too restrictive? Is there some friction? A hot spot? Maybe we’ve just grown and evolved. The old model might not fit anymore. Maybe it’s just time to size up.