The Girl in the Little Red Boots
For the past two months, I’ve been cooped up in my house, either gimping here and there in an aircast or working on my bed because it’s more comfortable than the couch. I’ve not taken an actual walk probably since September, back when The Trouble started in earnest.
Though I know the pandemic has severely affected many people simply for the feeling of being shut in and shut down, here in rural southwestern Virginia, it hasn’t affected my activity all that much. I still went to all the usual places, albeit wearing a mask, which makes sense to me anyway, considering flu and cold season. In the summer, I took the kids for long nature walks, taking our ID guides with us to learn about mushrooms, birds, and butterflies, often taking the beagle, too. We went to parks, leaving before they got too crowded. We’d take a soccer ball and kick it around, go to the dogpark and throw tennis balls, ride our bikes down the Huckleberry Trail. I was determined to keep us as active as I could.
But by the end of August, I really couldn’t ignore the pain in my right ankle anymore. It curved down around under my arch, a dull ache that no massage could touch, that set my calf to cramping and spasming. It felt like I had a constant internal bruise. I knew my shoes were no good — I’d not replaced them in three years, too concerned about making sure everyone else in the family had the shoes and clothes they needed. And I’d stopped wearing orthotics a long time ago; they were just too expensive.
When it became clear that we’d be remote schooling in the afternoons, I booked morning ballet classes for the children— 6 hours a week total — in the hopes of giving myself necessary time to write. What actually happened was that all that time was eaten away by months of grueling physical therapy and doctor’s appointments until finally an MRI in late December confirmed my fears — a longitudinal tear in my posterior tibialis tendon.
My doctor immediately spoke of surgery. “What we’ll do is we’ll break your heel and move it over an inch or so, put a screw in it to hold it steady, and then we’ll either repair the tendon if it’s not too bad or we’ll cut it out and use another tendon from your foot or possibly a corpse…”
By then, my inner self had put its hands over its ears and was singing “Lalalalala” loudly.
“How long for recovery?” I asked faintly.
“Six months minimum, likely,” he said. “Two months of no movement after and then slowly working back into regular weight-bearing movement. It’s a big surgery. Your foot will probably never be the same, either.”
My face must have betrayed my anxiety because he said, “It’s not like we’re going to cut your foot off or anything.”
“Thanks.”
He then had me stand up, observing with tilted head how I stood on my feet. “I mean,” he gestured, sighing. “Just look at you. The way your knees and ankles and feet are…you just…your foundations are entirely wrong.”
I flashed back to the little red orthopedic boots I’d had to wear when I was learning to walk, since I’d never walked properly from the start. It would have been funny except for the fact that he was talking about the incontrovertible fact of the way I held myself on the ground, and how that way was wrong.
I thought too of how not only did I not walk correctly, but that I wasn’t talking fast enough or well enough, either. My tongue was clipped; it just ends in a flat groove rather than a tip. Whether all of this — the boots, the tongue clipping — was truly necessary, I don’t know, but it left me with the distinct feeling that I couldn’t walk or talk right. And here was this doctor again confirming my suspicion that at the base, I just wasn’t right.
I pleaded for more time, asking if the tendon tear could heal on its own. He shrugged and said he was willing to let me try. Immobility for a month in an aircast, with a knee scooter to get around if I desperately needed to go somewhere.
I tried hard not to be angry. I tried to see the time as a gift. I tried to joke and say that at least it wasn’t a hand — I could still type. But it still smarted to know that all the gains I’d made in stamina and health over the summer would be lost. It smarted even more deeply to know that at the foundation, the reasons for this were that I bore some genetic deficiency that hadn’t been corrected no matter what was done, that I had ignored taking care of myself, telling myself that it didn’t matter. Until at last it did. Worst of all, I hated that I was now a burden to my family; I went from being in charge of the household management to being able to do none of it and watching my children despair as to whether we would ever go for long walks or play tag again. (They are given a bit to melodrama; I suppose they’ve learned it from me.)
The metaphor of forced immobility does not escape me. For the past year, my life, like so many others, has been on hold due to the pandemic. As I said, that didn’t bother me perhaps as much as it did other people because I tend to keep to myself anyway, and nothing here was entirely shut down, except a few kid things like the pool and the trampoline park.
Even more deeply for me, the writing life I had hoped to resume full-time after I was laid off from my dayjob of fifteen years has stood still. No matter what I have done or tried, how I have tried to shift things, nothing has worked. Not only is it just the fact of the pandemic and that I am solo parenting through it most of the time, but it seems that something about my work is not quite…right.
I am supposed to always keep moving, keep working, keep making things, no matter how much my heart breaks, no matter how much I break myself wide open to write the things perhaps I shouldn’t say. I am, it would seem, as oddly-shaped in the ways I tell my stories as the way my body has learned to walk or talk. Falling arches, crashing cities, torn calves, cut tongues, tendons strained to the breaking point — these are the things I make because they are what I have had to make survival out of. Those inner broken landscapes, that little red-booted child taking all the wrong steps to find love and safety, and the one city inviolable that I had to build within so that I could live through things far worse than a cut tongue.
It is hard to hear your foundations are wrong when you already know that to be true. You know you should not have had to learn to survive by dissociating. You know you should not have to continue walking on broken feet because you’re simply trying to help your family have the best life they can. You know maybe that you should take care of yourself, but you also don’t really know how in a way that doesn’t feel insipid. You are afraid to ask for help because you don’t entirely know what you’re asking for, or how to accept it if you could ask. (And maybe you’ve been trying to learn, maybe your friends have been trying to teach you, but it’s been hard. They are saints.)
The metaphor is there and I could wallow in it far longer. But as the pandemic solitude stretches, I try to think less about the metaphor and more about what it’s teaching me. “The teacher, like a thief, has to steal away the mental constructs we all create that act as barriers to the visceral experience of life…. And still the person will maintain: That’s who I am, that’s me. It’s really our concept of who we are, not who we are.” (greenriverzen.org)
I know what my concept of myself has been: that of a person distinctly not right in some fundamental ways. But does it have to remain that way? Am I tethering myself to a concept of not-rightness that no longer serves? Will I let others reinforce these concepts or resist them? These are the questions I ask myself now as I spend my days looking out my window on the bare, leafless world.
Spring will come again. I want to meet it as a new person. I want my heart to ache less, almost more than I want my leg to heal. I suppose in fact that I want my leg to heal so that I can heal my heart again in the wild places I found in the summer, so that I can possibly find more. I want what is broken to stitch up stronger, for the rebuilding of the foundation to be on fertile, safe ground rather than devastation.
I want to think of that little girl in the red boots and simply love her, endlessly love her, for everything she was and still can be.