shoes for a dance

For my daughter's first high school fancy-go-with-a-date dance, she went to homecoming. She was a freshman. He was a sophomore.  I had bought a custom couture off-white (winter white) sleeveless shift at a garage sale next door.  It was a very classy, Princess-Grace dress that was fancy even though it was simple clean lines. And it fit her like it had been made for her, emphasizing her emerging hips and bosom. She looked smoking hot. And I had only paid one dollar for the dress and none of the kids at her prep school ever knew it was not a hot, expensive dress.

The dress, as I wrote, was couture. It had the designer's label sewn on. I forget the designer's name but it was a name designer.  I want to say it was John Galliano; it was most definitely 'couture'. Someone had gone to a very high end designer and ordered a customized dress for herself.  It was gorgeous, inside and outside. All the seams had been covered in stretchy lace,as if to make the inside of the dress just as perfect appearing as the inside. The fabric was a bit puffy, with little 'bubbles' of lacey-like fabric. It was a lacey texture that appeared delicate but it was a sturdy, thick fabric. This was a solid, winter-white, post-Labor Day cocktail dress for fall or winter.  There was one tiny spot where a few shreds in one of the little bubbles had come unwoven but not noticeable. I am still amazed she agreed to wear it because it was imperfect.Since she was not with me when I bought it, I did not know it would fit her as if it had been made for her. Rosie resisted touching used things. She hated to use library books, for example, because she did not know who had touched them. Yeah, she's got OCD issues.

I had the also good idea to buy, if we could find them, over-the-sleeve, off-white gloves. It was hard to find those gloves. We scored them at one of those cheap accessory stores. The fabric gave her a rash but she wore them anyway. It looked so Audrey Hepburn at Tiffany's.  For cheap gloves, they still cost something but the dress bargain emboldened me to spend.

And then there was the matter of shoes. In October in Minnesota, you don't find a lot of shoes that match a winter- white fancy-dress.  We went shopping for shoes for that dance, without exaggerating, at least eight times. And when my kid went shoe shopping, I discovered, one trip could take up an entire day and involve trying on a dozen pairs of heels. She could spend an hour with one pair even when it was instantly obvious to me and the sales person that the shoe wouldn't work.  I remember feeling a lot of frustration over how long she took shopping for the perfect shoe. I had the impression she thought if we looked long enough, we'd find a pair of shoes that were also winter white. I had the good idea of asking shoe clerks if they thought we could find winter white shoes. After many shoe clerks told us "No way", Rosie e opened up to other possibilities.

Very shiny silver shoes would not have fit the look.  We did find a nearly perfect pair so if looking perfect matters, all those hours shopping paid off. Sometimes I think of those shoes and the endless shopping to find them and I think that for that reason alone, Rosie should never have left me.  I don't think many moms I have ever known would have been so doggedly patient or shopped so long for just a pair of shoes for a not very important dance. Love drove me.

She bought a pair of shoes the salesperson called 'pewter' but they weren't pewter. They were not gray, not gold, not silver but they had a shimmer, a muted shimmery tone. They were muted enough that you didn't really notice them, which, we decided, was as close as we were going to find to go with that dress. Note that the dress had probably been made in the fifties when pointed off-white heels would have been routinely sold after Labor Day each year and it would have been easy to find a perfect match.  Altho the shoes were called pewter, I thought they were almost no color with some shimmer, a hint of glitz. Perfect for a h.s. dance. I remember that those shoes cost $60. A $1 garage sale dress, sixty dollar shoes which, in 1996, was a lot more money then than now, right?

I guess her OCD came out on that shoe expedition. For awhile, I felt like I had entered a rabbity hell-hole of endless shoe shopping in the Mall of America. If we couldn't find the right pair at the Mall of America, with Nordstrom's, Bloomingdale's, Dayton's (now Macy's but then, still Dayton's), plus the endless shoe stores in the endless mall, we would not find any. We covered shoes stores in the Uptown area, also downtown. Shoes.

I never questioned investing all that time on a quest for something that held virtually no personal value for me I recall a few moments of inner despair that I hid from her. In those moments, I felt like we were never going to find a pair of shoes she would accept. Rosie mattered to me. Dresses and shoes have never mattered to me.  As a teen, I imitated my friends' interest in clothes but not since then. As a mother, however, I combed through every sale rack looking for bargains to please my fashion conscious child.

She went with a shimmering, metallic pair that weren't really any color. A neutral shimmer with a glitzy buckle on the closed toe. The shoes cost sixty bucks in 1996, which sounds cheap now but it was a lot to pay for shoes she was going to wear once. By the time she settled on this pair -- and we visited that pair several times before the decision was made -- she had tried them at least five times.

And we talked about this purchase ad nauseum during these weeks of shoe shop hell. It started out as fun mom-daughter shopping but by the end, it was hell.  For me.  I think she loved all that shopping. Looking back, I feel sorry that I treated myself as I did. And her. I should have set more limits. I should have told her that if she wanted to shop endlessly for shoes, she could but she would have to do it alone, or with girlfriends. The shoe search became nauseating for me and yet I did not let on, not wishing to make the shoe search even more stressful.

An easy part of the shop was buying a cheap pair of long, above the elbows, off-white satin-like gloves. The gloves were my idea and it really set off the whole look. At later dances, some of her girlfriends wore gloves in imitation, as teens  imitate one another. But when other girls added gloves, they didn't pull it off. Long, above-the-elbow gloves at a spring dance with a floor-length ballgown just doesn't look the same as a light mini dress with very lightweight, satin-appearing over-the-elblow gloves. Plus the other girls did not have Rosie's elegant, Princess Grace lightness. The gloves were super cheap, at one of those super cheap accessory shops. The gloves gave her hives on her arms but she kept them on, the look irresistible even to her itching self. As soon as she said good bye to her date and stepped into our home, she pulled them off. Her arms where the gloves had been were covered in allergy hives. She said it was worth the itching. That everyone at the dance had noticed her and her date had said he was with the hottest girl in the school.  She liked me then.  She didn't even know formal gloves existed until I suggested them. As I grew up, it was common for girls to wear white gloves for going to church and especially for fancy events, like weddings. When I suggested gloves to Rosie, she had never heard of dress gloves as a fancy-dress accessory.

When I first met her dad, he was newly graduated from law school, with a lawyer job. He bought several business suits and we went shopping together.  Men's suit pants are custom hemmed for each men.  You can choose (at least back then) a plain hem or a cuff. If you go with a cuff, you choose the height of the cuff. One and three quarter inch cuff? Two inch cuff? And where did you want the slacks to break, at the knee, just below the knee and how did the cuff fall on his shoes.  I was just dating the guy but being a good girlfriend, I helped him shop.  Shopping with him was nearly identical to shopping with Rosie. He would takes ages to choose a suit, then ages to agonize over the length of the pants, the break at the knee, the height of the cuff or even whether there should be a cuff. And shirts to match. Ties to match. What is wrong with me that I went along on what were, for me, such stresfully boring outings, spending my weekends shopping obsessively for perfection when I never really cared much about  clothes.  I am an idiot.  I did all that endless shopping because I loved them. I am a chump.

He would call me about the cuffs.  For his first suit, and I don't think I am exaggerating, I think he called me fifty times about 'to-cuff-or-not-to-cuff' and 'one and three quarter inch versus two inches'. He would call at 12:04 a.m. and ask 'cuff or not cuff, tell me what you really think'. At first, I could debate the pros and cons of the choices he presented.  He would call at 12:22 a.m., then at 12:25, then at 12:42 and 12:51.  Et ce tera. Etcetera.  Etcetera.

After awhile, I would beg him to stop asking me. And eventually I had to unplug the phone if I wanted to end the calls for the day. And then they started up.  We actually had a joint session with his therapist about the cuff calls. The therapist said it was okay for me to refuse to take a dozen calls a day about the same damned pair of cuffs. The therapist suggested I say "It is only one pair of pants, one set of cuffs, the height doesn't matter. One and three quarter inch or two inch. It doesn't matter. I'm hanging up now."And I did say those things and the cuff calls stopped. But there were other situations just like that.  Endlessly.

And I  married him.


I don't remember if he respected the agreement.

But when our daughter obsessed about finding the perfect pair of shoes for that dance, and I went along with her crazy obsessive shoe search, I felt very much as I had felt with the cuff debate.  And I always assumed her OCD stuff came from him.

I went along with the behavior. Does that mean I was also OCD, just OCD about different things?

What should I have done?  People tell you not to indulge the obsessions of your obsessive child but for the child, it is a very painful, real struggle. It wasn't really her 'fault' that she got snagged by the shoe shop. Was I supposed to amp up the stress by arbitrarily refusing to shop or just  buying any old pair of shoes?

I probably made all wrong choices. But I spent a whole lot of my real life shopping for those shoes. And she still abandoned me once she got into the Ivy League. She waived around that campus and said "Now that I am here, I don't want anything to do with you" and I have not seen her since.

One time, I sat in one dressing room at a downtown Minneapolis Dayton's dressing room in the junior jeans section for 6 hours. It was a Sunday. We got there when the store opened at noon. We were there until the store closed at six p.m. She tried on many dozens of pairs of jeans. And I went on other crazy jean shops. Buying jeans brought out lots of stress.

I think she should still love me, for the shoes and the jean shopping and all the love I poured.