Cinderella in Reverse

Me in my stylish saddle oxfords.  I rememer those socks.  They were pink and green circumferential stripes.  I think they were boy socks.  That dress was red and white checked.  Mother must have let me pick my outfit that day.  I was not quite three here.

 

Saddle Oxfords ruined my life.  The whole time I was growing up, my mother’s fashion sense was stuck in the forties.  In the picture above, you see me modeling a scuffed and dirty pair.  I absolutely despised those shoes.  Almost as soon as they came out of the box, they looked horrible.  I was then, and still am, incapable of keeping my clothes and shoes nice.  I ought to wear  brogans and a burlap bag for all the good dressing up does.  Now I wear nothing but dark jeans with cotton prInts,  plaids, stripes , checks, or florals.to confuse people and look presentable longer.    I can reach in my closet and pull out any pair of jeans and any shirt and it will do.  It is the same for shoes.  I have brown, black, and navy shoes that go with anything.  Five minutes and I am dressed.  Of course, life does occasionally demand a dress, but I have a few in classic styles that get me through anything.  No thinking required.

I was stuck with saddle shoes because Mother liked them in high school.  She somehow didn’t notice styles had changed by the time I came along.  After I started school, Mother just took a paper where she’d marked around our feet to the shoe store and brought shoes home to us.  We were stuck with her choice.  Length was the first concern.  We were going to be wearing those shoes awhile so she got them big.  Sometimes it looked like we were wearing skis.    Durability was a major issue.  With five kids, she had to get something that lasted.  Those damned oxfords lasted.  I’ll bet roaches will be wearing them long after the apocalypse.  Oh, and Mother thought the were “cute.” so that covered style.

On “shoe day” I’d beg Mother for strap shoes.  Mother was a tyrant on dressings us.  We wore what she bought and learned she wasn’t taking any backtalk.  Patent leather would have thrilled me.  That wasn’t going to happen.  I always got the same story.  “When patent leather gets wet, it cracks,”  I didn’t care.  I still coveted it.  The next best would have been red leather shoes.  Mother was a tyrant.  We wore what she bought.  Our opinion didn’t factor in on trying to dress seven people on a pitiful budget.  “No, I can’t get red  shoe polish.  They’ll look awful,”  I always hoped for a miracle, but no patent leather shoes,  velveteenshoes, or cowboy boots ever came home with her.  I guess she never got a look at those dirty oxfords I clumped around in.  In theory, the saddle oxfords could be polished nicely.  I was so rough on mine, they still looked liked thunder after polishing.  The scuffs were more gray than white.  Mother was not particularly good at polishing, anyway.  After Connie and Marilyn came along, she had me polishing my own and I found out what a crappy job really looked like.  I smeared white all over the edge of the black.  Did you ever see chicken poop?  It’s mostly black with a little white saddle on top.  That was my shoes in reverse, mostly white with a dollop of black.  The white was generously slopped on the black.  We always had that pathetic white  liquid shoe polish that  didn’t cover worth diddly.  It was only good for making the black look worse.  Not only that, I was supposed to polish my shoes the night before.  I’d get up the next morning and realize  I’d already been threatened to polish my shoes a couple of times, and slap on a messy coat of white.   It didn’t usually have time to let it dry, much less buff, so I looked a mess.  Better yet, if I’d waited too late, I got polish on my legs as I walked around.  See, it was all Mother’s fault I wasn’t a fashion icon.  I guess there are just some kids destined to wear saddle oxfords while others get patent leather.  Life isn’t fair!

The third child on the hay is my sister Connie Swain Miller.  You see here she got a good dose of those ugly shoes.  They look even worse without socks.  The other two children were family friends.  Notice all the diapers on the line.  My younger  sister Marilyn was seventeen months younger than Connie.  She may have escaped the Saddle Oxford Curse.  You notice they have sneakers, or tennies, as they were called then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

45 thoughts on “Cinderella in Reverse”

  2. We almost got to pick out our shoes (there were only two of us). We were taken to the shoe store the week before school started. Shoes polished Saturday night for church in the morning. One of us also polished my dad’s shoes – I think after the Army, he never wanted to see the shoe polish kit again. I would always, almost destroy my shoes in a matter of weeks. I didn’t understand the frustration until we had a child who had feet.

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    • I was such a wild kid. My clothes really suffered. I probably would have ruined chain mail. I was always getting three-cornered tears, loosing a dress sash, or getting buttons ripped off. I kicked off shoes anywhere I landed. We were always looking for shoes. A time or two I left them at a cousin’s house when I stayed over. That was a disaster since I never had more than one pair.

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  3. Soul Gifts's avatar Soul Gifts says:

    Mum used to buy us those horrid plastic shoes when we first came to Australia! Cheap and nasty, and sticky hot…. But back in Finland, before we sailed across the seas, I do remember being given a pair of black patent leather shoes one Christmas. Oh joy of joys!

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  4. I must have been satisfied with the shoes my parents bought me, because I don’t remember them. I still missed the fashion bus. I wear jeans six days a week and am grateful I don’t have to think about what to wear. I snickered aloud while reading this, and grandson David looked at me quizzically. I wish we’d had time for me to read it aloud. We would have been on the floor laughing.

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  5. I can’t believe you wrote about saddle shoes! I had forgotten about mine until reading this post. I HATED them!!!!! My mother, like yours, made me wear them. I’m sure they brought down my self esteem about 20 notches. Back in those days, making your daughter wear saddle shoes was child abuse. Great post.

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  7. Your photos brought back memories. I too had saddle shoes back in the 1960s. I absolutely hated those shoes. I thought that they were ugly. So one day after I got off the school bus I flung one shoe into the gutter. I don’t remember what I said to explain to my parents as to why or how I was coming home from school with only one shoe but my parents must have bought the story because Dad took me back to the Buster Brown shoe where I got a new pair of shoes! 😀😁😂🤣😃😄😅😆

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  8. I am a fan of saddle oxfords, truly. But when you compare them to red Mary Janes, and I only get one pair? I want the red Mary Janes. What girl wouldn’t?
    My youngest still wears patent leather, which we refer to as shiny shoes. She got her first real pair of small heels to wear with a suit for an event, but after wearing them once, she decided she’s better off with shiny shoes, and back to shiny shoes it was. She’ll probably stay that way, cause she’s 14 and still in kid sizes. Kid shoes seem to be made to care for feet…
    As a kid, I had good shoes, but never the name brand, fancy label shoes I coveted. As a parent, I also refuse to buy them, so perhaps that’s just how it is. I buy the running shoes for the kid who actually runs, cause I consider it equipment, but I don’t buy the others expensive sneakers. I see y’all wanted Keds. I’ve worn Keds and Converse most of my life. Loafers were from Sears, and not Bass. Maybe they made the duck shoes, too. The ones I wanted were whoever made the boat shoes with the duck label. Mine were knock-offs. Nikes and Reeboks were what I wanted, and I mostly got knock-off sneakers, too, from discount department stores where you did not want to see and be seen, while the lucky kids were at the mall.
    What do lucky kids even know?

    I DO notice all the diapers on the line. Oof.

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