Pradas and Perfectionism (Megan)

“Baby, if you want to be perfect, you must suffer!”  Lalli’s flashing eyes and threatening tone left no room for misinterpretation.  It made no difference that these pointy toed Pradas were two sizes too small for me.  If I wanted to join that evening’s party I must find a way to make them fit. Like one of Cinderella’s ugly step sisters I subjected my feet to painful contortions and squeezed into the  slippers.  Those elegant shoes were the culmination of an entire day’s preparations for Sicily’s most prestigious jewelry show. That very morning, I had been greeted with Lalli’s sad pronouncement, “Megan, your hair, she has died,” and was swiftly escorted to Palermo’s top beauty salon.  Surrounded by a throng of spirited Sicilian women smoking, gesturing, and conversing in animated streams of Italian, I underwent a series of miseries. Following the styling, the waxing, the makeup, and the perfect black dress came the shoes - instruments of torture, manufactured for my penance in Dante’s Purgatory.  

    Wobbling to my feet and wincing with pain, I was rewarded with applause and lavish compliments.  “Nonni says, ‘Belissima! You are perfect! And the Italian models will hate this most beautiful American girl!’” Lalli interpreted with satisfaction.

    I suppose the evening might have held some magic, had not every step  been spoiled by the hateful shoes. As we left the party, I stumbled to keep up with my hosts, silently rehearsing every Italian expletive Lalli had taught me and rolling my r’s with a vengeance.  Falling behind my companions and unable to endure another moment of this pain, I kicked the shoes to the curb. The spell of that evening was broken, my stockings were in shreds, and I had never felt so relieved.

    I have begun to view tight shoes as the bane of my existence.  My early childhood years were spent in ugly, hand me down loafers, emblems of the stifling dress code and legalism of the private school which brought on my panic attacks.  Getting dressed for Kindergarten, I would locate the heels of my white tights by the blood stains of chafed heels squeezed into these inflexible shoes. When I was old enough to select my own footwear, I still had to buy them a size too small.  My sister told me that I just needed to break them in a little, but they never stopped pinching.

    I spent most of my twenties and thirties pregnant with swollen feet.  When I complained to the doctor that I could no longer zip my cute sandals, he called my stretch mark and puffy ankles “collateral damage.”  Then, when he placed a squealing, 10 pound bundle of pink in my arms, he couldn’t help reminding me that my suffering had been worthwhile.  “See?  Your baby girl is perfect!”

    I had always assumed that, with enough will power and determination, I could be a perfect mother.  I studied the most exceptional role models – the women with college degrees and magazine homes who found time for gym memberships before classically educating their children and serving organic, gourmet dinners.  My own experience was a cheap imitation of their Facebook feeds. It seemed like I was always falling behind in this race, struggling to catch up with my peers in my Walmart sneakers with paper-thin soles. I took some measure of pride in the fact that my homeschooling was characterized by discipline and rigor. “What I didn’t realize then was that the word ‘rigor’ comes from the Latin rigor, rigoris, which means  ‘numbness, stiffness, hardness, firmness, roughness, rudeness.’  Rigor mortis literally means the stiffness of death” (Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest).   Ironically, on my daughter’s graduation day, I hobbled to the podium wearing a single shoe.  My other foot had become severely infected from a neglected blister on my heel.

    After my sixth child was born, I ordered the perfect pair of fuchsia running shoes and trained for a marathon.  During this rare escape from the noise and demands of my young children, I began to seriously evaluate my focus and priorities.  And in those solitary hours, an intense and lonely restlessness began to stir in me. I realized that I had spent the past two decades running my race alone, buckling under crushing standards of perfectionism, and limping through self-imposed demands that were chafing and confining me like a tight pair of shoes.  

    Several months later I met my sister for coffee and told her that my family and I were leaving New England and moving to Alabama.  Expecting my news to be met with shock and some disapproval, I was surprised to see the wistful look in her eyes, “Megan, this is your chance!!  You get a fresh start, and this time you don’t have to be perfect.”

    The season leading up to our move to Alabama was one of the most challenging and humbling times of my life.  Arriving to a state I had never even visited, homeless, and with eight children, we gratefully accepted the hospitality of strangers who welcomed us as family. These dear friends invited us into their homes, fed us, transported us, and then showed up with raincoats and smiles on our moving day.  They did not leave until all of our boxes were in the right place, our beds were assembled, and our pantry was stocked with everything we needed.

Since moving to the South, I have felt a freedom and relief, reminiscent of kicking off Lalli’s shoes and walking barefoot on the streets of Palermo.  The similarities between Sicily and this sleepy town were unexpected. The pace of life down here is ridiculously slow and the “language barrier” can be a frustration, yet there’s a sense of family-like community, warmth, and authenticity that nourishes my spirit and assures me that I am finally home.

“The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals.  And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger stronger, quieter life come flowing in.” (C.S. Lewis)

     In the past month I have experienced a calendar catharsis.  I went several weeks without a phone or Internet and relished the break from so many deadlines and appointments. I picked up the book, The Life Giving Home, by Sarah Clarkson and was inspired by the author to try a Facebook fast.  Sarah captured the profound effect of unplugging from social media when she wrote about her own experience, “As the days continued, the quiet grew.  That one departure from Facebook empowered me to resist the Internet in general, and a hush grew daily within me as I rooted my consciousness once more in the world of touch, sight, sound, and breath.  I found myself newly aware of the rhythms of light and dark...I found a silence of possibility in the evenings, in which loneliness or longing were channeled into letters written and spaces ordered and stories sketched out instead of submerged in the pain-killing run of the Facebook feed.  I looked, with a fixed attention I had often lacked (to my shame), upon the faces so dear to me, and I listened to my loved ones without restlessness or distraction” (34).  

When the pressures of chasing one year old twins, educating our older ones, guiding our daughter through college, and maintaining our new home threaten to overwhelm me, I take a step back and honestly evaluate what is most lasting and important.  More often than ever before, the checklists and workbooks are tossed aside in favor of early morning snuggles, bubbles on the deck, soft-baked cookies, tumbles on the trampoline, and just one more chapter of our favorite book.  This is my only opportunity to walk hand-in-hand with my precious children, and I don’t want to miss a single step of the journey.

    I’ve always let my kids choose their own shoes, and my entryway is strewn with every manner of footwear, from flashing sandals to ballet slippers to bright rubber boots to moccasins to soccer cleats.  Each pair expresses my little ones’ interests and individuality. Yet, even with so many choices, they will most often prefer to run barefoot. At the end of the day, I will kneel over the tub, scrubbing countless  toes that wiggled out of their confinement, and I will tease the toddler who made the most mud. Sometimes, after the children and teens are settled for the night, I will pull down the last souvenir from my month spent in Sicily - Lalli’s Pradas.  Squeezing into them, I will close my eyes and remember what it was like to spend an evening as an Sicilian Cinderella. Then, when my toes begin to pinch, I’ll give thanks once again for chipped nail polish and hot pink flip-flops and embrace my imperfection.