Morton’s Toe
Your kid is just like you, just not the way you expected him to be.
In September, I took my 11 year old to the pediatrician’s for a checkup. We should have gone a few months earlier, but our health insurance charges us if a kid gets a physical less than 365 days after the last one. Over the years, the regularly-scheduled camp physical in June had slid into July. Then, I sort of forgot to go to it before going away in August, and then, all of a sudden, we were in September, scrambling to get the kid to the pediatrician’s during middle school lunch. We needed to fill out the blue card so he could run on the cross-country team.
The rush meant that the kid hadn’t really had time to think about whether he wanted to go in for a physical alone. At the last minute, he decided it’d be less scary to sit in his boxers, on the paper mat, on the examining table, with his mother than without. I am pretty sure this is the last checkup I get to go to.
So there we were, waiting for the doctor, my long-legged kid swinging his feet, looking around at the sports decals up on the walls. Right then, not in the eleven previous years, I noticed his big feet, his big toes, and most especially his big second toe. Or I should say, my toe. On each foot, the kid’s second toe was the longest of the bunch, just like mine. “Hey,” I said, “ You have my toe!”
He, in that nonchalant, middle-schooler voice said, “Morton’s Toe.”
I vaguely remembered Morton’s Toe from my own cross-country runs in high school. It meant that thing when your whole foot went numb when you were running. The only thing to do was to take your shoe off, rub the foot till you could feel it again, then lace up and get back to running. In the examining room, I Wikipedia’d it, and up popped “Morton’s Neuroma,” apparently a common accompaniment to Morton’s Toe. Some famous people have had nerve surgery to correct it, which to me seemed kind of drastic, but then maybe I hadn’t been a dedicated enough runner to need it.
But back to the toe. How did my kid even know what Morton’s Toe was?
“YouTube,” he said. That didn’t really narrow it down. He sees everything on YouTube. It turned out he had been watching a YouTube video about Weird Facts. He hadn’t tried to self-diagnose his extra-long second toe. It had shown up on the Weird Facts video, and then he had realized he had a Weird Fact, right there on his own foot.
But back to me. This wasn’t Morton’s Toe. This was my toe, the one that makes my whole foot look funny, especially to normal-toed people. The foot-and-toe configuration has some other names, including “Greek Foot” because it shows up on classic statuary, and “Neandertal Foot” because some Neandertals had it. I didn’t Wikipedia that one, so who knows, maybe every Neandertal had one.
I wasn’t surprised that the middle schooler and I shared a genetic trait. I knew I had produced this kid. But, for a parent, it’s always a surprise to find what thing you have common. This growing, handsome kid had the same weird trait I had—you know the kind of weird. The kind that shapes every day of your life in a bunch of small, repeated transactions with the universe.
There are other weird traits, of course, and not every trait is weird. Blue eyes are recessive, but not weird. Color blindness qualifies as weird but, like the Toe, when it’s hidden in footwear, it’s usually invisible to other people. Morton’s Toe is a can’t-roll-your-tongue kind of weird. You know, basic, demonstrable, not always apparent, weird.
When you have a kid, if he is handsome or she is pretty, that aspect is a bonus, an easy win, really, because your kid is always beautiful to you. What you want, maybe expect, maybe even think you deserve in the beginning, is a kid with all the traits you have that you think are positive, preferably then multiplied by a factor between two and ten. If you are good at eye-hand coordination, for example, your kid should have, I don’t know, two to three times the baseball-throwing accuracy that you have, at a minimum, for life to be fair. If you produced this kid with your other half, who has the same positive trait, you can’t help but feeling entitled, that your kid should have double the positives that the two of you have.
Genetic traits don’t work that way. Early in the game, I thought my kids would inherit my SAT scores. So far, that looks unlikely. Later on, I hoped they’d at least get my husband’s SAT scores, but that might not pan out, either. We’re more of a “Hey, let’s play Xbox!” than a “Hey, let’s recite The Odyssey!” family. By the time we got to the third kid in the lineup, I had made peace with the reality that each kid was growing up as an individual. I no longer expected a clone or a hybrid.
But this one kid in the doctor’s office got my toe, a trait that will shape every day he gets up, gets dressed, and finds one foot or the other going numb on long runs. It’ll affect him every time he walks in flip flops into a dining hall or onto a beach, when another kid, or even worse, a girl, notices his funny-looking toe. It’s a reminder of the small, constant effects that shared genetic traits have on you, had on your ancestors and will have on your descendants. Whether it’s the trait you thought you’d give them, or not. You share the same influence or pressure of that trait on the daily, physical experience of life.
The kids and I went skiing. By mid-afternoon, my feet were killing me. I had to take a hot chocolate break. I needed to get the boots off. I did. The kids and I drank hot chocolate, and then we booted up again to go for one more run.
My kid has big feet and Morton’s Toe, invisible in his enormous boots. Invisible, weird, and shared. Way to go, kid. Don’t forget to take off your shoes and stretch out those toes.
