Feet and the maiden
Some years I am so weighted down and distracted by my workaday life that I have a hard time locating some authentic, profound feelings of gratitude around the holidays. This year, the news helped me locate some of these sentiments. Happy Thanksgiving, readers.
As I slipped on my shoes and left the house the other day, I noticed once again how much larger my feet are than my mom’s. I’ve taken a larger shoe size than she does for the last 30 years, but sometimes it still surprises me how small her feet are. Although I barely remember my Chinese grandma, I know that she also had small feet. It struck me as strange in that moment that my father chose to marry an American woman whose feet were tiny like his mother’s. Family lore is that my grandma’s feet were bound when she was a girl in China, presumably to improve her marriage chances. The family was poor, but bound feet were desirable in a girl. Small feet emphasized a woman’s daintiness and femininity. Artificially small feet, made by wrapping bandages tightly around them to prevent growth, also made it unlikely that a woman would venture outside often, and if so, not very quickly. A woman’s place was in the home, and having doll-like feet guaranteed that. If her husband was domineering or physically abusive, she would have little alternative other than to stay and endure her fate. According to my mom, my grandma’s foot-binding ritual was not completed, so she had more mobility than women in previous generations.
My mom grew up in the Midwest, and her feet weren’t bound. But as I considered the shoes, I thought of all the rational and irrational signs that an adult uses to find and marry the familiar. I doubt that my father looked at her feet and made the connection to his family. But sometimes I wonder how people as unlikely to marry as my parents chose each other, particularly in the 1960s in Middle America. My mom’s small stature and shy and docile nature as a young woman must have been attractive to him, a sign that he would be in charge in the relationship. After they were married and he began to abuse her, the fact that she didn’t leave or demand that he stop was more evidence that he could continue beating her, just as he’d seen the men in his family treat their wives.
Lately there have been high profile domestic violence stories in the news, particularly in the NFL and professional sports. There’s an entire hidden world of spousal and child abuse, including in our supposedly civilized culture. When I was a child, I didn’t know that spousal abuse happened anywhere other than our house. Later, after my parents’ divorce and when my mom worked in a domestic violence shelter, I learned that some of the people who sought protection were from families not like ours — clergy, professionals, and other respectable people with ugly home lives. People from these kinds of unhappy families often replicated what they saw, something the literature referred to as the generational cycle of violence.
This is a difficult subject to write about. My mom didn’t come from a physically abusive family, but that was no inoculation against marrying a violent person. I was lucky enough never to fall in love with an abuser. But when I consider my upbringing, I know that luck was only one part. My father’s behavior was the anomaly. Once free of him, my mom made sure my brother and I never again witnessed domestic violence. I took it for granted, but as I grow older and raise my own children, I begin to understand the magnitude of what it takes to not replicate the past.
