I heard about a study through either Stanford or Harvard University (can’t remember which, and it doesn’t really matter) that a child develops about 80% of their intellect, skills, and personality by the time they reach 6 years of age. I would like to insert the word beliefs to the list of this sponge period. In that time, imagine how much good and bad information is coming in around the conversation of the self and ultimately, self-worth. Personally, I have logged many hours in thoughtful curiosity toward my responses to people and situations, how I live, love, and the choices I have made, tracking it back to those informative years. Informative—informing, inform, in form. Here is one story that comes to light in my query around my low count of (by many women’s standards) shoe ownership and clothing, and the ever-so-popular conversation about—self-worth.
It’s 1963 and saddle shoes continued to be a fashion rage, or who knows perhaps they were merely a practical purchase by my parents—the shoes that went with everything? Knowing my family dynamic, post depression era people, I think that the latter may be more of a true statement. Nonetheless, I loved my saddle shoes, and besides my patent leather Mary Jane's for the special occasion and a pair of sneakers for everyday, they were the prized fashion statement of a six-year old kindergarten school girl. Never mind, that my clothes were handmade out of my mother’s old maternity dresses by my maternal grandmother, as long as my black and white’s were on my feet I felt I had a place amongst the other fashion-forward little girls on the playground. But in truth, there was already something plaguing on the inside about—self-worth.
I remember very distinctly, as if etched in my brain, about a very happy little girl named Anna Marie. She was in my kindergarten class and during recess she was the girl that everyone wanted to hold hands with, skipping and running at recess. She was always at the side of the favorite yard-duty teacher, and in my six year old brain, if you were lucky enough to hold her hand, then you were something. My woman brain, is still struggling with her little girl’s less than sense of self, but then there are the shoes. And the shoes mind you, are only part of the story, but they are a profoundly simple metaphor which I’m getting to. There was also the birth of my sister, which I believe to be the beginning of the unconscious seed planting years for me—at three. Apologies, I digress, that story for another day.
Back to the shoes! My parents both worked and my sister and I were under my grandmother’s care during the week, with weekend stays at our family home. So granny was in charge, of everything, including the maintenance of the beloved black and white saddle shoes. As you can imagine, the shoes would come home after an active day at school, a little scuffed up and by granny’s standards, required to be polished before the ringing of the next day’s school bell. This ritual, I presume, proved to be too much of a burden or inconvenience for her, for the next thing I know the white polish disappeared and out came the black instead. Insert little girl tears here. The white of my saddle shoes were now painted with the black polish, and my word today, for I how I felt then is—orphan. I felt like an orphan. Little Orphan Lori, dressed in hand-me-down rags and all black shoes, like the ones you would see beneath the Catholic nuns’ habits at church. Compounding the already shaky ground of self-worth, the feelings of shame comes in. No wonder, thinks I, the six-year old girl, she is not the one that the other girls on the playground race out of class to hold hands with during recess. The all black shoes...not my magic shoes, at all.
I find it amazing and quietly sad, that the information received and perceived during those in-form-ing years still has some kind of hold on me today. I write it down today as a way to honor the ripe and precious feelings of the little girl—grown to woman who has been saddled by shoes, not saddled with them.
