I was online recently ordering a pair of shoes. As I typed in my size—10—I forcibly banished the image of Cinderella and her tiny feet from my mind, wondering if, and when, this love/hate relationship with my feet would ever end.
As a child, I never noticed my feet except for when I stubbed a toe or stepped on a bumblebee. But then I became an adolescent, and my feet grew. And grew. It didn’t matter that the rest of me was growing, too; all I noticed was my feet. Others did, too.
“You’ve got big feet like your father,” my mother, a size 6, said. This was even more of an insult than it sounds. My father had left us years earlier, so to share a trait with him was, well, traitorous. It was bad enough that I’d been told I had his profile on one side. At least I could keep my head turned so that people wouldn’t notice the similarity. There was no way I was going to be able to hide my feet.
My sisters teased me about my feet. “You look like a stork,” Suzie, then a size 5, said. Yvonne, size 6 at the time, pointed out that it didn’t matter how good I was now—and I was the good girl in this broken family—I would never be a princess like Cinderella.
It wasn’t until high school that I started to hold some of my critics’ feet to the fire, so to speak. I remember shoe shopping with Brenda, one of my best friends. She teased me when I asked the clerk for a size 9.
“What size do you wear again?” I innocently asked.
“An 8.” She smiled.
“And how tall are you?”
She stopped smiling. I was five-eight; she was several inches shorter.
“I wonder who has bigger feet, proportionally,” I said. Brenda didn’t tease me about my feet again.
But I still hated my feet. Years of watching Cinderella had convinced me that having big feet—proportional or not—was unattractive. And society did nothing to convince me otherwise. Men brag about having big feet. It’s supposed to be a reflection of their, um, masculinity. Women, on the other hand, never brag about having big feet. Big feet are considered anything but feminine. There’s even an old Senegalese proverb, “Never marry a woman with big feet.”
I moved to New York at a size 9. I loved the city and would walk for miles. I walked my size 9 feet into a size 10. It was only one size, but the increase to double digits felt exponential. To add insult to injury, it turned out that most shoes only came in full sizes after size 10. So on the off—and frightening chance—that a size 10 was snug, there was no 10 ½; the next size was 11. It was as if, once women reached a certain shoe size, the manufacturers had decided that fit didn’t matter.
Despite my double-digit foot size, I met and married a wonderful man (size 12). I got pregnant. And soon every mother I knew began telling me how much her feet had grown during pregnancy. I refused to waste prayers on maintaining my size 10 feet—all I truly wanted was a healthy baby. I like to think I was rewarded for my selflessness. I ended up with two healthy babies and my feet never grew beyond a size 10.
Then I began running for the first time since college. When I went to buy running shoes, the clerk measured my feet and came back with a size 11.
“Um, I wear a 10,” I said.
“You usually go up at least one size in running shoes,” he told me.
I brought home a box with size 11 emblazoned on it and briefly considered using a Sharpie to conceal the size from the world, or at least my family. But I didn’t. I didn’t want my daughter—who would be sure to have big feet given her genes —or my son to think that foot size mattered.
I began to think I was over caring about foot size. But Cinderella was my Achilles’ heel. I saw a pair of blue ankle boots in a Manhattan store window and went inside. I asked the clerk if I could try on a size 10. He insisted on measuring my feet first.
“You’re not a size 10,” he said. “You’re an 11.”
I felt flustered. Nearly all of my shoes were a size 10; I even had two pairs that were a 9 ½.
“I’ve worn a 10 for years,” I said. He looked at me doubtfully, and I briefly fantasized about measuring my big foot against his smug face; I decided to be kind instead. “I’ll try both sizes, in case they run small.”
He came back a few minutes later. “I only have them in a size 10,” he said, dumping them at my feet as if I were one of Cinderella’s stepsisters. “I’m sure they’re going to be too small.” Then he went to wait on someone else.
I put on one boot and then the other, half afraid that I might burst the seams. But, in fact, the boots were big. Too big. I looked around for the clerk, but he was helping someone else, and I needed to get to class. I turned to the woman trying on shoes next to me.
“Will you please tell the clerk these didn’t fit?” I asked. “And be sure to tell him they were too big.”
I might have gloated that day, but I had to swallow my pride weeks later when I went to buy trail shoes at a local running store. After measuring my feet, the clerk came out with two pairs of trail shoes for me to try.
I loved the blue pair. I loved them even more when I looked at the box and saw that they were a size 9! My running shoes were usually an 11, and here I was with a size 9. Were my feet shrinking? Even if my feet were shrinking because of age, I didn’t care. I was wearing a size 9 again. I was back in the single digits!
Unable to keep my excitement to myself, I gleefully pointed out the size to the clerk. “I usually wear an 11 in running shoes,” I said. “I can’t believe these are a 9!”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s because they’re men’s shoes. I didn’t have an11 in women’s.”
If shoe size were in any way related to ego, I would have left that store a size 6.
I’ve been thinking of this recently as I have fallen in love with a new model of running shoes. The only problem is that they run really small. But I ordered them anyway in, yes, an 11 ½.

My new running shoes
Size aside, I love my feet. They help me walk, run, bike, and dance. When those Cinderella fantasies trip me up, I remind myself that if Cinderella had been a runner, those glass slippers would have been rejected from the get go. How can a girl walk, let alone run, bike, and dance—really dance, not just waltz with Prince Charming—in tiny glass slippers? And as for foot size, I’m sure I’m taller than Cinderella.

Really, who has feet that are smaller than a fair godmother’s hands?