Life : Boot Disappointment

It only took one demoralizing day of trudging around shopping centres before I turned my mind – like the eye of Sauron – to the interwebs with its online shoe stores that only seem to cater for toddlers and clowns and absolutely no-one in between.  Honestly, it’s tempting to start either binding my 7 year old daughter’s feet or injecting them with growth hormones simply to guarantee her a lifetime’s worth of cheap online shoes. Surely, she’d thank me for it.

Anyway, after many nights of fruitless online trawling, I finally found Them. The Ones. In a brand I knew and in the size I needed and with an ingenious combination of zippers, elastic and scaffolding to cater for my generous calves AND at a price I could (kind of) afford. I clicked ‘BUY!’ and then sat back to wait for them to arrive.

Unfortunately for everyone at work, I didn’t sit back quietly.

“It’s Boots Tuesday!!!!” I’d exclaim to anyone who came into the office. And when ‘Boots Tuesday!!!!’ failed to yield any boots, I proclaimed the next day to be ‘Boots Wednesday!!!!!!!’ with equal, if slightly more manic, enthusiasm. And so on.

I even pointedly told the lovely Australia Post contractor who makes our usual deliveries that the next time I saw him IT WAS IN EVERYONE’S INTEREST that he have my boots with him, thank you very much, no pressure but SO HELP ME GOD, etc.

Now, before anyone thinks I was getting too carried away, I should stress here that I drew the line at mentioning my boots in my bi-monthly therapy session – not because I thought my therapist wouldn’t share my excitement but because the cost of therapy was almost akin to the cost of the boots and using therapy time to talk about the boots felt like too much like I was doubling the price of both. If you know what I mean.

My partner, also caught up in my whirlwind of Boot Expectations, expressed what I like to think was admiration at my infectious enthusiasm but was quite possibly pure fear. He then went on to confess that he’d never be able to share his anticipation of something with other people in such a way in case it all went wrong, like the boots were the wrong size.

“If they’re the wrong size, then I’ll just call them the Stupid Boots and we’ll have something else to talk about!” I laughed gaily – and my laughter continued well until the next day when the boots arrived and they were the wrong size. Stupid boots.

Turns out that I had ordered a UK size 7 in a UK brand boot from an Australian retailer who sent me an Australian size 7. Some might say I was at sevens and sevens. You know, instead of being at sixes and sevens and… aw, just forget about it.

ANYWAY, luckily there was a staff meeting at work that day where I was able to add ‘Boot Disappointment’ as an agenda item. There was a collective sigh around the table when the item came up – I like to think this was because my workmates all shared my pain and not because they knew they’d have to endure at least another week of Boot Talk.

But really, people, it’s hard being me. As I write this post, I’m still waiting for the replacement boots to arrive. I even had to downgrade ‘Boots Tuesday!!!’ to ‘Boots Tuesday’ (please note distinct lack of exclamation marks) and – I can’t be sure about this – but I suspect my calves are planning an Incredible Hulk-style revolt when the new boots finally arrive. Perhaps I should have stuck to bagels. If preheated in the microwave, I’m sure they’d keep my feet just as warm this winter…

The formerly fashionable NDM had three children and discovered that brown is the new black the hard way. The force behind the once-was-blog Not Drowning, Mothering, she now very occasionally writes for the sometimes-blog The NDM. In her spare time, she enjoys baking cakes, cyber-hassling advertising executives and collecting photos of unusual objects made out of paperclips.

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