Barbie Doll Feet and the Beginning of My Demise

“She can’t expect you to do that!”

It was my mom, protesting on the phone.                                      

“She can.”

“Why in the world would she think you can do that?”

“She doesn’t know. Why would she know?”

“Well you need to tell her! Doesn’t she realize what you’ve been through?”

“No, Mom. No. She doesn’t.”

I sighed. In a moment of emotional neediness, I’d called my mom to talk about the proposal from the manager at Cracker Barrel. I needed to increase my work hours to 35 hours per week so that I could qualify for the company’s health insurance by my probation date.

When Mary Beth the HR girl told my manager to add hours to my schedule or I’d be moved to another part of the restaurant, the manager had a “solution.”

And it was nothing I ever expected.

Let’s dial back about 24 hours before the phone call to my mom … when my manager called me into her office in the storage room.

“Well,” she said, eyeing a calendar over her desk, “You need to add hours to the schedule. I don’t have enough to give you to work on the retail floor. But you can make them up by doing one thing. You’ll have to come in early, though.”

She looked at me, with one eyebrow raised. I’m sure she was ready for me to balk, but I answered, “Sure. I’ll make arrangements for my mom to take my child to the school bus stop so that I can be here early. I’ll do anything to qualify for the health insurance. What time do you need me here?”

“7 a.m.”

“Done. What do I need to do?”

She looked past her office door and smiled a Mona Lisa smile … one of those smiles where there’s a hint that what the person is about to say isn’t going to match what’s really going on inside their diabolical mind.

“You’ll help unload the morning truck. We will have a lot coming in now that we’re getting more into the Christmas season. I’ll need you to stock the shelves in the storage room.”

I gulped. The storage room, as you remember, was like the “Room of Requirement” in Harry Potter’s Hogwarts castle, crammed with every conceivable gadget, pancake mix, quilt and candle to deck the halls of every country-décor-loving American woman in a 100-mile radius.

But how hard could it be? I would just take the items in from this “truck” and put them on the shelves. And the shelves were already so crammed, it couldn’t be that much more to do.

Could it?

“Sure! Not a problem!” I said, summoning my sweetest Cracker-Barrel-country-fresh smile. “I’ll do it!”

And therein was the root of my mother’s objection.

See, what the manager didn’t know was that before I’d even filled out a job application, I’d endured three horrendous months of physical therapy on my feet and legs.

The basic problem … was that I have … for lack of a better description …. Barbie doll feet.

Any woman who has had a Barbie doll as a child or who has daughters with Barbie dolls will understand this. “Barbie doll feet” are shaped so that the doll literally stands on her tip-toes. They’re perfect for tiny plastic high-heeled shoes. And … pretty much … my feet have a similar shape. No, I don’t walk around on my toes all day, but the arch of my foot is so high that after about seven years as a regular runner, I was told that the bones in my feet would break unless I had physical therapy. I’ve been told more than once that there are women in Japan who wrap their feet in such a way to force their arches into the arches with which I was born.

By the time I started working at Cracker Barrel, I had regained strength in my legs to resume my gym workouts. But I was still wearing a certain type of shoe, along with expensive inserts that my podiatrist had designed with a computer program to give my feet as much support as possible. And I’d begged this doctor to sign off with her blessing for me to take a part-time retail job. She was dubious that I could stand for several hours at a time, but until this point, I’d pulled it off, albeit with a great deal of Ibuprofen at the end of my shifts.

And this was the root of my mother’s objection.

Fast forward back to that phone call ….

“Are you going to tell her about your feet?” she pressed.

“No. I’m not. I need these hours. Besides, I’ve been lifting weights!” I shot back.

“This is very unfair, what she’s doing to you. If she’d given you the hours in the first place, you wouldn’t be having to do this.”

“Well, fair or not, I need this health insurance. I’ll make it work. Besides …” I paused ... “what could possibly go wrong? I’m strong again. I can take a few things and put them on shelves for a few hours. No big deal. No. Big. Deal.”

Right.

That’s what I told myself.

Tune in for the next part of the story, “An 18-Wheeler and the Impossible Odds of Completing the Mission Impossible.”