A letter from a reader

At 63, I was about to be the mother of the bride in flats

My daughter Katie got married in May, and about a month before, standing in front of my closet, I made a decision I did not tell anyone about. I was going to wear flats. To my own daughter’s wedding. I am 63, I am not a writer, and I am telling you this because I suspect I am not the only mother who has quietly made that decision and felt smaller for it.

The photographs came back last week, and three different women who were there have since asked me about my shoes, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

Here is what thirty years of heels had taught me. They come in two kinds. The pretty ones, which look wonderful in the car and are off under the table somewhere between the speeches and the cake. And the sensible ones, which stay on all day and make you look like the mother who gave up. I had a shelf of both. And so for the one day I would be photographed more than any day since my own wedding, I was going to be a little shorter, and a little sorrier about it, in every single picture.

Pretty and off by the toast, or sensible and looking like I had given up. For Katie’s wedding I was going to choose flats.

Nobody decides to be that woman. It happens one sore evening at a time, until you have talked yourself out of heels altogether and started calling it being practical.

Then the other mother stood up in a pair

Diane is the groom’s mother. She hosted the shower in April, in her yard, and she wore a pair of wine-red heels with a pointed toe and a strap across the front, and she was on her feet for the entire afternoon, pouring, carrying, hugging, and not once did she sit down and slide them off, which is what I would have done inside the hour. So over the dishes I asked her, plainly, how.

They are called the Sylvie, from Iris & Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. Diane said the trick is the heel and the straps. I ordered the wine that evening, fully expecting to send them back.

They did not go back. The flats stayed in the closet.

What happened at the wedding

I wore them with a navy dress from the church steps at eleven in the morning to the last dance at ten that night. Nine hours. I counted, because I could not believe it.

Three different women asked me where they were from before the dinner was served. And Sue, who has known me twenty years and has never said a kind word about a shoe, said I looked taller and happier than she had seen me at anything. From Sue, that is a speech.

Here is why they work, as far as I can tell. The heel is a block, not a spike, and it widens where it meets the ground, so on the church steps and across the lawn for photographs there was nothing to wobble on. There is a strap over the front of the foot and another round the back, and between them the shoe stays exactly where it was put, so I was not gripping with my toes all day the way you do in a slingback. They slip straight on, no buckle to do up, no bending. There is a soft cushioned feel underfoot. And the pointed toe, covered in those tiny cut-out daisies, is properly pretty, which after all those sensible pairs felt like being let out.

I have worn them twice since, to a dinner and to church, which for a heel is a record in this house. The pretty pile and the sensible pile are both still on the shelf. Neither has been out.

Three things I have learned since

One. It was the heel shape all along. A block that flares at the base changes everything about how long you can stand. I had spent thirty years blaming my feet for what was really a pencil-thin heel.

Two. Straps are the difference between wearing a heel and managing one. One over the front, one round the back, and the shoe comes with you up steps and onto a dance floor without a single thought. No buckle. They just go on.

Three. Three colours, honest sizes. The wine I own, a black and a white, from a 4.5 all the way to a 9.5. I went back for the black. Diane, I am told, has all three.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Sylvie is $44.95. It was $90.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because a heel this pretty that you can stand in for nine hours is usually priced like a plane ticket.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and this is their final summer sale as they close this chapter of the shop.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman had written, “Wore them to my son’s wedding and never took them off. First heel in years I could dance in. The little daisies get compliments every time.” That was the one that decided it for me.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting on the porch with an iced tea and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If there is a wedding or a dinner on your calendar and you have already, quietly, decided on flats, I understand completely, and I would ask you to wait ten minutes before you do. Not because a shoe will change your life. But there is something in standing at your full height in the photographs of a day that matters, and I nearly gave that up over a heel shape.

Two practical things. The sale is on now, and the middle sizes go first. And once this stock is gone, it is gone.

I am in every photograph from that day, and in every one of them I am standing up.

Peggy