It was 90 degrees both days this weekend and I was playing the piano in a wedding on Saturday (despite the fact that I've not played the piano for ten years). That meant that in the 90 degree heat, my feet were dangling from a piano bench or wedding reception chair from 2 in the afternoon until 11 at night.
I woke up Sunday with so much water in my feet, I could literally feel it slosh as I walked (thundered?) around my parents' house.
I have ugly feet. I'm not under any misconceptions about the long, skinny, bony monkey toes and craggly flippers I have. As I wrote in my graduate thesis, my feet are so flat I can make a suction sound when I slap them on a wet floor. Well, not any more.
Somehow, tons of extra water entered my pregnant body and sank into my feet, which now look like balloon animals or dinosaur paws, cankles included. I kept hearing this voice, nagging and reminiscing since my birth, telling me: The one thing your Gommy always told me that was true was that pregnant women should put on sneakers first thing in the morning and never, ever take them off until bedtime. No matter what.
I remembered working at K-mart that first summer, when this monstrously pregnant woman would come in every day in flip-flops, teetering around on engorged animal feet. I used to wonder if it was appropriate for a 16-year-old K-mart cashier to pass on my grandma's wisdom and decided against it. Now, experiencing it, I wish I had spoken up. I also wished my own mother would stop repeating it as I rolled around on the couch and moaned. "Sneakers!" she kept saying. "You need to go out and get some sneakers!"
Well I didn't have sneakers with me on that trip home and I sort of thought the whole swelling thing would sneak up on a girl gradually, like the baby bump or the awful bowel movement troubles. Appartently, swelling is a different category altogether. When we got back to Pittsburgh I shoved those yams into some Pumas and made Corey wait on me as I elevated them. This morning, things are slightly better, but I still have cankles oozing over the tops of my shoes. Things have begun to get interesting.
After years of nomadic temporary employment, advanced degrees, and chocolate ice cream, a rugger with a love of knitting and a cyclist with no domestic skills signed a Ketubah and bought a house in Pittsburgh.
2 comments:
crank up the AC and elevate your feet, drink more and it will come out.
My mother and grandmother never told me anything like that. I don't really think sneakers could prevent your feet from swelling. You just need to stay off them more-and keep them elevated.
--from butinsky mil
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