Well, I did not even come close to winning The Manolo's Super Fantastic Essay contest, but after reading the things that did win, I'm not feeling too terrible about it. Anyway, here is my entry, which I think is definitely worth at least $1,000 worth of shoe merchandise.

Are there Shoes after Childbirth? Or, You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Until It Doesn’t Fit Anymore

My friend Roberta has, like, 300 pairs of shoes. Or rather, she has 300 pairs of shoes, gave birth, and now has 300 pairs of shoes that don’t fit.

It seems that in pregnancy, tummies and breasts aren’t the only things that expand.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, for fear of enabling her habit, but now that I myself am ready to give birth any day now (stress the word “ready”), I find myself mourning my few pair of fabulous footwear, the ones I rarely wore but knew were there, patiently awaiting my booty call.

My shoes were the first things I outgrew. No worry, then; I was managing an ice-cream shop and required to wear non-slip black industrials: the muumuus of the shoeniverse. But then I got fired for being pregnant, threw away my non-slips (no more food service!), and then sat in my closet, looking for something sexy to elongate my puffy tootsies.

No va, baby. Nothing fit. Not my anodized aluminum cut-out wedges with the mirrored cuff. Not my three-inch black stilettos I wore for a very important first date. Not my dancing pumps with the Lucite heel that I wore on my wedding day. And, worst of all, not my red lizard mules I bought one week before my positive pregnancy test and wore once.

So now I give new life to the cliché “barefoot and pregnant,” not only wondering what I’m going to wear to my discrimination lawsuit but also: if they warned us about this pregnancy by-product in Sex Ed, or on “Sex in the City,” would the world suffer a population decline? Roberta and I think it’s possible.