The highest pair of heels I ever bought lie redundant in my wardrobe. Barely worn they are as new except for the veil of cobweb laced with dust which shrouds them.
They are outrageously, irresponsibly, ridiculously high. Six inches, at least.
I never wear heels. I have no need: barefoot and shorts-clad in the African outpost where I live, the only thing between my soles and the floor, a slippery talc of dust. Where on earth will you wear them, my Head demanded in irritation even as I handed my credit card over, what a waste it tutted, crossly.
But I bought those heels. Higher than any I have ever worn.
My Heart wasn't listening.
I laughed as I tried them on, teetering around the store. Some observers smiled, some looked on po-faced: they thought I was too old to be lurching, giggling, giddily across a shop floor to the amusement of my - then - eleven year old daughter.
Go on Mum! Get them, she urged.
I had warned my big kids, 'When I next go shopping, I'm buying heels'. They looked up briefly from Harry Potter. Unimpressed. 'Ok' they muttered.
I was already shorter then than my two eldest. Now I'm shorter than all three and much lighter than my son. Once I could pick him up. Now he does me, sweeps me clean off my feet, hugging me in an embrace so tight he winds me with his man-child strength. And with the joy, the sheer beautiful take-your-breath-away unexpectedness, that he still, sometimes, wants to hug his mother.
And my eldest daughter, willowy-tall and slender, clasps me to her close so that my head fits snug into the curve described by her shoulder and neck. My face beneath her chin. My skin, lined and pummelled by the march of time, the tread of three children who have added more to laughter lines than to the frown that folds between my brows (that'll be squinting too often into an African sun because I cannot locate my dark glasses) looks parchment-old against the smooth alabaster of her young one. Even the little girl who looked up and laughed at her mother careening around the shoe shelves of a large London department looks down on me now.
They chuckle, my kids, 'Come, little mama', they tease and manhandle me to remind me that they can. Now.
Once it was I who lifted them, swung them upwards and in dizzying circles, round and round, higher and higher, and shrieked weeeeeeeeeee to rapturous applause of their delighted laughter: encore mama, encore. And so again,weeeeeeeeeee. Because I could. Then.
And when I read to them, at bedtime, their sweetly intoxicating Baby Shampoo scented heads close enough to plant random kisses upon, near enough so that I might inhale deeply and any still busily worrisome whirling dervish thoughts be stilled by that unrivalled high. When they drooped, sleepy, curled against my body, beneath my arm, beside my hip, soft child-flesh filling angular shapes. A perfect, perfect fit. The last piece of a jigsaw puzzle; the one you'd been looking for.
I didn't just buy heels so that I could smile at their expressions when they noticed my new found elevation.
I bought heels so that I could buy some time. Fill a space again. So that - briefly, oh so briefly, for the heady feeling did not last long before they caught up and overtook me - I might feel the shape of their heads against my shoulder. Be able to gaze down protectively at their crowns.
Mind the gap, Mum, my youngest warned as I boarded the tube, tottering perilously on my precipitous new shoes.
Sometimes you don't notice it until it's too late, see. Sometimes the gap between nurturing your young children so that they might fly, and the point at which they are big enough to unfurl their wings presents itself with such suddenness that you are at once tripped up and winded.
It is important, then, I have found, to be able to reach out a hand and grab onto something to steady yourself. It is nine years since I bought my heels as I tried to buy back time.
At last I think I have found a crutch to steady myself.