Birthing Beautiful Ideas

My 18-month-old son, A, has ginormously wide feet.

Like, wiiiiiiiide feet.  Feet that are so wide that I have never been able to squeeze them into any of the shoes I’ve ever found at Target (i.e. our affordable-shoes location of choice).  Feet that are so wide that they have literally drawn gasps from those who have looked upon them.

I love his feet.  They are squishably adorable baby feet, the sorts of feet that are the epitome of squishably adorable baby feet.

But there’s a catch to all of this squishable adorableness.

Before A started walking, I often chalked up his foot girth to the rolls (yes, rolls) of fat with which his feet were once cloaked.  And as much as I adored those rolls, I hoped against hope that once he started walking, all of the extra “foot-exercise” would “thin-out” his feet a bit, so then we wouldn’t have to make any trips to those outrageously expensive kids’ shoe stores to find footwear that fit his tootsies.

But this morning, four months after A’s first step, a day in which he was still only able to fit into the pair of Crocs that I purchased for him this summer (and FYI, Crocs aren’t exactly practical in during Ohio Decembers), I decided that it was time to make my very first journey to Stride Rite and buy some really damn expensive shoes for A’s really damn wide feet.

Turns out the kid doesn’t just have wide feet.  He has what the Stride Rite saleswoman called “double-wide” feet.

Just like a couple of trailers.  Parked at the bottom of his (c)ankles.

Trying on shoes didn’t take very long since there were only two styles in the entire store that came in “double-wides” in A’s size.  So after we spent nearly a gabillion dollars on a pair of tennis shoes for A’s trailers, we took our loot to the car, and I began buckling the kids into their car seats.

And then our shoe-extravaganza took a surprisingly scary turn as one of those large wind gusts that I had heard the weatherperson predict on the news earlier this morning blew through the area.  I heard an awful creaking sound and felt the car rumble and shake violently, and I literally threw myself over the boys as it all happened.

From where I lay, I saw the giant metal awning, which mere seconds ago had hung above the Stride Rite entrance, skid across the street just a few inches to the left of my leg.

Suddenly, the saleswoman from Stride Rite was rushing out to the car to make sure that we were alright, and I was unbuckling car seats with lightning speed. 

Debbie (my Stride Rite hero) helped me carry the boys to safety inside the building, where I took a moment to decompress.  To chuckle (in what was surely a moment of shock) about the “freak things” that often happen to me.  To hold the boys a little tighter than they were probably used to.

After exchanging a few harried yet relieved words with Debbie, I asked her if she had seen “all that glass” on the sidewalk as we were sprinting inside the store.

“Yeah, but I think it was just some plastic that had broken when the awning hit the lightpost,” she responded.

“It hit the lightpost?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think it hit the lightpost and then was knocked over toward your direction.  Oh my God, oh my God, I’m so glad that you three are alright!”

“Me too,” I muttered, still wondering about the glass.  “You know, I’m going to check outside real quick to see if it did any damage to the car.”

And then I saw it.  Our entire back windshield, shattered to pieces.  Not cracked.  Not marred by a hole in the glass.

But gone.

And the door that was open as I was buckling A into his carseat?

It could no longer shut entirely because of the force with which the awning hit it.

(This was one iron-clad awning, if you haven’t pick up on that already.)

The enormity of what has just happened was starting to hit me, was finally starting to seep its way into my consciousness, but I still wasn’t ready to “go there” quite yet.

Because I needed to file a police report.  I needed to gather insurance information from the store manager.  I needed to call Tim to come and pick us up from the mall because I couldn’t really drive home with the kids in the car, without a back windshield, in the middle of a windstorm.

And after about fifteen minutes had past, I finally burst into tears.

It wasn’t the car.  I didn’t give a flying crap about the car in that moment.

Instead, I was letting my mind “go there.”

To the “what ifs.”

What if we had left the store a minute later, leaving at least one or even all three of us still outside before the wind struck?

What if I had asked M to stand and wait on the sidewalk next to the car while I buckled in his brother first?

What if I hadn’t popped my head into the car to check A’s seatbelt right before the wind struck?

What if M hadn’t been acting up in the backseat, thereby delaying the moment in which I stepped outside into the awning’s path?

What if my children had been in the path of that awning as it flew across the sidewalk and street with enough force to shatter our entire back windshield?

I know parents with lives much different than my privileged life face these “what ifs” almost daily.  I also know that not every parent is lucky enough to even ask “what if” while staring at their very-much-alive child’s face.  And I even know each second of our life and each one of our decisions has some sort of meaningful impact on our future.

But I also know that I cannot even begin to face the other side of the “what ifs” that I asked myself this morning in that store filled with overpriced children’s shoes.

It’s too impossibly painful even to think about the other side of the “what ifs,” to articulate what that “other side” could have been.

I do know and can articulate this, however: there are lots of people who deserve some hefty thank-yous after today.

First and foremost is Debbie, shoe saleswoman and superhero to my kids and me.  She got us drinks and held A while I filed the police report and gave me loads of hugs and joked with me about how we both needed to go out for a glass of wine after this all was done and even volunteered to be a witness for me if one were ever needed.  She’s awesome, and if you’re ever shopping for really damn expensive children’s shoes in the Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio, you should go and see her and tell her how awesome she is for me.

Many heartfelt thanks also go to the cleaning staff at Easton.  Those guys were under no obligation to clean out the trunk of my car with a ShopVac, but they did it anyway.  Hell, they offered to do it at a moment when my mind was eons away from thinking about my car.  Again, they are totally awesome people who make me wish that I were independently wealthy and/or wielding lots of community power so that I could lobby to get them major raises and/or giant holiday bonuses.

Thanks too to the anonymous mother who, after purchasing shoes for her daughter, returned to Stride Rite moments later with a bag of Harry and David chocolates in her hand.  She gave them to me and said, “I didn’t know what to do for you, but I know that I need chocolate when I’m in crisis mode.”  Dear anonymous mother, I hope everyone on this planet gets to experience moments of small-yet-enormous kindness-from-strangers like yours.  Oh, and M and I finished the whole bag of chocolates before we even pulled into the driveway of our house, so yes, I guess chocolate was what I needed too.

And for anyone who needs a jolt of levity right now, I’ll leave you with this:

As I was on the phone with my mother earlier this afternoon, recounting for her the events of our day, I got to giggling and said, “You know, it would have totally sucked if my obituary had read, ‘Kristen died after getting whacked in the head by an awning at the Stride Rite.’  But you guys would definitely have had permission to laugh about it after my funeral.”

And that’s the only “what if” I’m allowing myself to think about for the rest of the evening.