I sit in my living room throwing my fifth pair of shoes across the room after having unsuccessfully tried to stuff my foot into a too-small opening like Cinderella’s stepsister, except I have been framed because these shoes are mine and they are supposed to fit my feet and if Cinderella’s stepmother had been more clever, she would have gotten Cinderella immediately pregnant following the ball so her feet wouldn’t fit into her glass slipper either.
So many things people discuss around pregnancy and having children, like how to raise them, what to feed them, do you crate train them or let them roam free, but one thing that not a single person prepared me for is the issue of shoes, and the fact that not only do I no longer fit into any of my shoes, but I will never again fit into any of my shoes. This is because when you are pregnant, you are flooded with the hormone relaxin, a hormone that I assume was discovered when scientists were high because it goes estrogen, progesterone, and then oh what does this one do? Relax stuff? Well, we call that one relaxin.
Anyway, relaxin causes all your ligaments to fall off or spread out or something, I don’t know, I’m not a relaxin scientist. But what I can definitively say is that it causes your feet relax and spread out, which means post-pregnancy you can end up with feet that are a half-size bigger, or if you’re me, who the fuck knows how big they are now. All I know is I can’t wear any of my shoes and I’ve been living in flip flops, which are my least favorite type of shoe because it is like being slapped repeatedly by someone who is really bad at slapping, and also they’re too timid to hit you in the face so they go for the bottom of your foot and you’re like why are you doing this and they remind you that you chose this for yourself by putting on flip flops.
I did spend a lot of time looking up whether I could do some sort of Chinese foot binding situation in the last trimester of pregnancy as my situation became clear, which was that I was going to have to build up hippie callouses on my feet in order to get to the hospital because I had no more shoes to wear. Fortunately I found the aforementioned pair of flip flops in the back of our Jeep where I had thrown them on the off chance I hated myself someday and really wanted to drive that point home. But the internet was pretty light on whether I could torture my feet into staying the same size. Mind you, it was not vanity that drove me, but economics.
There is much written about the woman tax, which is the amount of extra money women have to pay in order to just exist in the world. The cost of period products, makeup, hair care, and let’s not forget the $7000 I had to pay for the privilege of getting cut open and launching another American citizen into the world, something that honestly I think the government ought to be paying me for because creating a future soldier for the climate wars really feels like a service to the country that ought to be subsidized. So I will not write more about the tax, but I will say that one thing I have not seen written about is the fact that once you have a baby, you will need all new shoes.
New hiking boots. New running shoes. New snow shoes. New dress shoes. An entire adulthood of slowly accumulating the necessities over multiple years, comprised of questionable purchases that were rationalized with, “Well, it might be a little expensive, but they’ll last me for a good long time,” and there is no such thing as your feet “bouncing back” after pregnancy, so I have no choice but to just…buy more shoes.
When my son asks why he doesn’t get to go to college, I will explain to him just how much I hate flip flops, and he will ask how that has anything to do with it, and I will pat him on the head and say he’ll understand when he’s older, and he will ask how much older does he have to be because he’s supposed to be going to college and I’ll just put on a pair of boots that fit and walk away from that whole conversation.
I fully thought Relaxin was made-up, but omg, I googled it and its actually real! haha