Not because he needed shoes specifically.
He was three weeks old.
Three-week-old babies do not need shoes.
But I had walked past a window display on my way home from the hospital where I worked as a nursing aide, in the November of the year he was born, and the shoes were small and white and had a tiny blue anchor embroidered on the toe, and I stood in front of that window for longer than I should have, which was longer than I had time for, and then I went in.
I spent eleven dollars on those shoes.
Eleven dollars was, at that time, two hours and change of my wages.
I did not have eleven dollars to spend.
I spent them anyway.
I brought the shoes home and I put them on Lucas’s feet while he slept and I looked at his feet in those shoes and I thought: this is what it is.
This is the whole of what it is to have someone who is yours.
The wanting to give them things.
The willingness to be without so they can have.
The specific pleasure of the small white shoe on the small sleeping foot.
My name is Dorothy Hale.
I am sixty-six years old.
I raised my children alone.
Their father, James, left when Lucas was two and Zoe had just turned one.
He left the specific way that some men leave, gradually and then completely, the calls becoming fewer and then none and the money stopping and then one day there was no James and there was just me and two children and a two-bedroom apartment on the east side of the city and the question of how we were going to be all right.
We were going to be all right because I would make sure of it.
This was not a brave decision.
It was the only option available.
You do not choose to keep your children fed.
You simply keep them fed, by whatever means are available.
I worked as a nursing aide for seven years.
Then I completed additional training while working nights and became a licensed practical nurse.
Then I completed more training while working and raising two children and became a registered nurse.
This process took twelve years.
Twelve years of school in the cracks between shifts and children’s appointments and the daily management of a life that had too many demands for the hours available.
I became a registered nurse at thirty-five.
I kept the job for twenty-eight years.
I retired at sixty-three.
In those twenty-eight years, I worked double shifts when the bills required it.
I worked holidays.
I worked the nights that nobody wanted because the nights paid the differential that made Christmas possible.
I bought my children shoes when they needed shoes.
I bought them coats.
I helped with field trips and school pictures and the particular costs of being a child in a world where childhood costs money.
I went without things.
Not dramatically.
Not in a way I ever mentioned to them.
I simply did not have the new coat that I needed that winter, because Lucas’s was more urgently needed and there was only money for one.
I ate the smaller portion at dinner and said I wasn’t very hungry and was not lying entirely because the anxiety of the month-end math had a tendency to reduce appetite.
I did not take sick days unless I was genuinely unable to stand, because sick days cost money and I was using the hours to build toward the vacation time I would eventually not take.
My children did not know most of this.
I did not want them to know.
I wanted them to grow up in the specific freedom of children who do not have to calculate.
Who can ask for things without worrying about what the asking costs.
Who can be children, fully, without the specific adult weight of knowing there is not enough.
I wanted them to grow up free.
Lucas was born curious and ambitious.
By twelve he was the kid who asked why about everything.
By sixteen he was already talking about business school.
By twenty-two he had graduated and had a job offer and was gone.
Not gone the way his father had been gone.
Gone the way children go when they grow up and build the life you raised them to build.
I was glad for him.
I was proud of him.
I was also, in the specific honesty of three in the morning, sometimes aware that the house was very quiet.
Zoe was quieter in her ambitions.
She had been the more interior of the two, the one who read and thought and processed things in her own time.
She went to school for social work.
She married a man named Paul who was kind and reliable and who loved her in the specific way I had always wanted someone to love my daughter.
She moved three hours away.
She called every week for the first two years and then every other week and then monthly and I told myself this was normal, children grow up, the calls change frequency, this is not a measure of love.
Lucas called less often.
He married Sarah in the year after graduation.
Sarah was efficient and organized and managed their household with the specific competence of someone who had decided what she wanted and how to get it.
She was not unkind to me.
She was correct.
