Shells: Picking Apart Pain and Womanhood
The skin on the bottoms of my feet is so hard that I have felt a dull ache somewhere in my heel after running miles barefoot on the beach; not until I pull my foot up on my knee do I realize that a small, sharp shell has dug in and stuck inside the callused outer layer of my skin. My toenails have fused into my toes, and the two have begun to grow together. There is a science to this, I’m sure. I could look it up. The nail grows out, but underneath it is this other, not quite nail and not quite skin, that makes it almost impossible to cut.
I used to get all varieties of blood blisters, on my smallest toe and on the front pads of my feet, dark reds and purples beneath thin, clear layers of skin, and in the arches, too, though I have flat feet and don’t have arches actually. This is another cause for wear and tear. I used to have metal and clay custom-made orthotics and every time I broke in a new pair, before the metal fit into the grooves of the new shoe, it would dig into the sides of my feet and they bled. I will not ever get a pedicure. To do this would involve someone smoothing out my feet, rubbing off my calluses. I can’t imagine the pain I would experience, the next day, running, 10 or 15 miles with my flat feet, my worn out shoes, my socks with holes in the heels.
I was in labor for 40 hours with our first daughter before I agreed to the epidural. I ended up with a C-section, all the drugs pumped into me one after the next.
When my milk came in, I made too
