Grandma's Shoes

Grandma’s Shoes

My mother is wearing her mother’s shoes. 

“You know what’s special about these shoes?” she asks me.  The lump in my throat hampers my attempt for a verbal response. I shake my head as she continues, “I can walk in these shoes that she never got to.” 

We were home from the funeral of heartache and pain, memories and laughter, listening numbly to one or two-sided conversations. The last bar of “I Love the Lord” wrapped up followed by “Amazing Grace”. My heart was heaving and I could no longer bear the loss. And then silence and peace. And a still, soft whisper of hope and faith and love. 

 “Remember, Remember the Fifth of November.” I remember…my mother’s memories. The story of her hand getting burnt roasting marshmallows as a child on Guy Fawke’s Day. The memory of little mice eating her candy when she lived in a church building in Earlestown. Memories of life and hope and love. I stared at the beautiful lady who still says full stop for period, crisps for chips, boot for trunk, and fringe for bangs. I had mimicked this vocabulary and gotten ridiculed in school.

Still, I wanted to mimic everything about her.

As a child, I could not wait to fit into my mother’s shoes. She had a pair of brown boots I used to love to wear. I remember my first over-sized pair of coral high heels she bought for me on a shopping trip. Now that I think about it, they were probably extremely “eightiesh”, but I thought those shoes were beautiful. I begged her for them and she let me get them.  I felt like a princess.

Then in what seemed to be a day, I went through a growth spurt and suddenly my feet outgrew my mother’s. Amidst my sister’s, mother’s, and grandma’s small feet, I felt like Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters.  I struggled to squeeze my over-sized foot into the glass slipper. 

I think this is our lifelong quest – attempting to fill the shoes of our mothers.

Like her mother before her, my mother is an angel in disguise. “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well.” (2 Timothy 1:5)

I think of mothers and the beautiful way God uses them to carry on His Son’s legacy on this earth.

I had watched my mother, my life-support and caregiver, take care of her own mother for four long years after a series of mini-strokes led to her gradual decline. The woman who had carried me in her womb for nine long months, picked me up and cradled me whenever I cried, rubbed my tummy when the pain just wouldn’t go away...had pain in her eyes. How would she function now that her own mother was gone?

She kept walking. She learned from her mother who overcame the adversity of polio and raised five children on the mission field. Who learned from her mother who raised ten children on a farm in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. Who learned from her mother, Susan Mariah Goodrum Shelton, who my grandma credited for being the reason for the family’s faith.

In her book, Coming Up for Air, Margaret Becker beautifully scripts memories of her mother and her longing to imitate her legacy, “My mom, connecting to the nurturer in her soul, moving in her gift, forming beauty, her gift soothing the agitated and finding beauty in brokenness.  It was life art, I am sure, directed and implanted by God…my last thoughts were of DNA and how I hope that along with the tangible connections, the spiritual predispositions are dispensed similarly.”

Six years have passed since that summer, the Summer My Mother Wore Her Mother’s Shoes. She is now three states away instead of just one. And I miss her. And I miss my grandma. I have a daughter of my own now and she loves to wear her mother’s shoes.

And I think back to the day I took her to get her polio vaccine. She cried from the pain and I cried because I realized she would never know the effects of the crippling disease or the lady whose lap I used to sit on when I rubbed her solitaire diamond ring back and forth, back and forth. But I smile now because I know she will know these stories through me and through my mother – her grandmother – the Lady Who Wears Her Mother’s Shoes.