When asked what my favorite part of my body is, my typical response is “my feet.” I was admonished once when I said this, because the person didn’t know me very well and thought that I was just answering that way because I felt bad about the rest of my body. Never mind that 1) if she didn’t know me, why was she asking me such personal questions, and 2) was she implying that I should be ashamed of the rest of my body (?!), because rude. But I responded to what I hoped was the heart of her comment and said that no, I just really love my feet. I love the way they curl and stretch. I love that they support me – literally.
Also, my feet are super cute. I mean, Anne Klein gets part of the credit of the picture above, because that’s a badass shoe, but let’s be honest – most of the adorable in that picture is what’s inside the shoe.
(Also…I miss those pants. I wonder what happened to them?)
Lately (meaning, in the past year), though, my feet have been a source of both physical and emotional pain.
I don’t typically view getting older as a burden. When I turned 30, I didn’t joke that I was turning 29 again. When I turned 40, and people told the joke for me – “So 39, part 2? Har, har” (again…rude) – I corrected them with, “Oh, no. I am 40. I have earned every year, and I am proud of it.” And that’s generally true. My life does not look like what I thought it would look like at 40, but I have to take into account that it was a 20-year-old me making those plans, so…grain of salt. I might have been a smart 20, but I was still 20, and there’s only so much perspective one can shove into that short a time spent on the planet.
But my feet feel the burden.
I crawled out of bed this morning, and my feet told me how long they’ve been walking. I limped to the living room to stretch and get a towel out of the dryer (because I’m managing to get out of bed early enough to make coffee at home, but not quite early enough to complete a round of Pilates, but I want my body to get into the habit of going to the living room first. Baby steps.), and it took longer than it has before to get the kinks out of my feet. On the surface, this does not seem like a big deal.
But in my soul, it is a very big deal.
I’ve watched beloved older friends and family lose mobility. I’ve watched them slow down and not be able to do what they were able to do before. Even though I know this is the normal way that life goes, it feels like a betrayal.
I feel like their bodies have betrayed them. I feel like mine is starting to betray me. I’m mad about it. In every other area of my life, I am 20 years better than I was when I made those goals. It doesn’t seem fair that my body is not keeping up. I want it to be able to do the things it did 20 years ago, and I want it to do them just as quickly. I want to double-up on efforts to fight this inevitable decline. I want to bombard it with vitamin-rich foods and lots of activity (that’ll…teach…it? I’m not good at threats.). I am willing to work at it twice as hard as I used to have to work at it. I just want my body back.
That, however, is probably not the way things are going to go.
This morning reminded me that I need to learn to live in the body I have this decade, not the one I had in decades gone by. As much as I want to demand that it adjust to me, I need to adjust to it.
I find this necessity supremely annoying.
I probably can’t stop the aching altogether. But I can listen to it. And listening to it will be good for both body and soul.
This was a year of abundant expectations followed by abundant distractions. Looking back, there’s no way I could have planned the year I had, but I am satisfied with it in general.
M. Suzanne Terry 