Amelia Robinson: What grandma's big, sore feet say about love, health disparities
This is going to sound weird: my grandma's feet have been on my mind.
Trust me though, It makes sense for me to think of them particularly around Mother's Day, a time when we think about our mothers and the mothers that came before them and what they've meant in our lives.
Grandma was a clotheshorse and a hat lady, but finding shoes that fit was tricky.
Her feet were not small and well-arched like my mom's and most of my aunts.
They were big and flat — like mine.
My grandma Nellie Mae's feet hurt all the time. Perhaps hurt is not a strong enough word.
She winced if you ever got within a few inches of them.
"Millie, you better watch my feet," grandma would often warn.
It would be your funeral if you ever accidentally stepped on or bumped one.
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I've always known my feet were boats like grandma's. Just look at them.
But I didn't know how much they could hurt until after I took a tumble more than a year ago that lead to months and months in a boot and eventually, a surgery.
The doctor told me the flatness of my feet are part of the reason I fell in the first place — that and searching the Internet on my phone while walking down the stairs.
My feet still hurt, but I know it is temporary. It will get better with time, continued elevation and shoe inserts that cost more than you'd think.
My grandmother worked on her feet all day long for decades.
That meant long hours in a nursing home kitchen to earn the money she and my granddad used to keep food in their eight kids' bellies and a roof over their heads.
My mother worked on her feet too.
She was a cleaning lady and worked in factories. Her feet hurt too, but not as bad as my grandmother's.
I have what my granddad would call a sit-down job. I spend a lot of time talking and typing — at least half of the time at a desk.
My grandmother's foot pain was no doubt made worse by health disparities that still see Black women receiving inferior care.
How much of my grandma's pain was unnecessary?
I often wonder how much those disparities factored into the length of time it took doctors to find a solution for the problem with my feet following that fall.
Black women experience "excess mortality relative to other U.S. women, including—despite overall improvements among Black women—shorter life expectancies and higher rates of maternal mortality," according to the National Library of Medicine.
In Franklin County, the infant mortality rate for Black babies has risen from just over twice that of white babies in 2014 to nearly triple that of white babies in 2021.
My grandma was a daughter of the segregated South — Chattanooga, Tenn. — and only a few generations removed from slavery.
She had a good family, but like many women of her time, Black women particularly, her life was far from charmed.
Grandma married young and lost a child and one of her sisters young.
Family lore around a photo of my great aunt in a casket is that the young, beautiful woman died during a botched abortion.
The image is embedded in my heart.
My grandparents were among the 6 million Black people who moved from the South to better opportunities in the North between 1910 and 1970 as part of the Great Migration.
My granddad worked at Ford and always wanted me to get a secretary job in the auto factory's front office.
My grandparents moved to Cleveland in the 1950s and raised their kids in Hough, a Cleveland neighborhood still recovering from a 1966 riot fueled by discrimination and police harassment and sparked when a white bar owner refused to give a Black takeout customer a glass of water.
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The house they bought the year I was born was our family's center.
My grandma lost the house to the mortgage crisis a few years before her death a few weeks before Christmas 2011.
Despite the bad times, there were far more good ones. And despite the pain in her feet, my grandmother was a strong and kind woman who loved fiercely and raised strong and kind women who love fiercely.
I inherited my grandma's big flat feet. I am hoping I inherited those other traits as well.
If you are lucky, your mothers and the mothers before her set the tone for your futures.
They carry you even when their feet hurt and the hurdles, they must jump are high.
Amelia Robinson is the Dispatch's opinion and community engagement editor. Twitter: @1AmeliaRobinson
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Amelia Robinson: Mothers of our mothers help shape our future.
