This is what I’ve learned: Life is a blame game. At least, it is for most people. Me too. But I was lucky enough to have a fairly innocuous bodily deformity to pin all the blame on, and while it took me decades to get “over it,” I finally did. That’s the good news. Let me explain.
I was my parents’ first born, and doubly a disappointment. First, I was not a boy. And second, I had twelve perfectly formed toes. This is not as uncommon as you might think; it’s called polydactyly (do you know any other words with three “y’s”?). In many cases, the extra digit is usually not a fully formed finger or toe, and is easily removed. Less common is my kind of polydactyly, where the foot is naturally shaped with six toes spread equally over its breadth. Of course, polydactyly also occurs in animals. Hemingway got a white six-toed kitten (named Snow White) as a gift when he was living in Key West, and a famous colony of Snow-White’s progeny is still there, about half of whom are polydactyl.
As far as I know, there was never any discussion of surgically “correcting” my deformity. There was no real health insurance in those days and my parents were not wealthy, so a defect that did not prevent me from walking (it didn’t) and could be covered up most of the time by socks and shoes was hardly worth discussing. I had crooked teeth, but no braces, teen-age acne but no dermatologist. That’s how it went. These days, I think “abnormalities” like my toes are often corrected when children are young – but back to that issue later.
Shoes have always been an issue, but – thankfully – I have always had a slight frame, so wide shoes with extra padding for my thin heels usually accommodated. As a child, my heel cushion was a wad of fabric wrapped around some cotton batting, but when I was an adult, I had cups made for the heels of my shoes. I always avoided sandals that showed all my toes, but ones that only showed four or five toes were perfect. And, as I said, I never had trouble with walking or balance. My twelve toes worked admirably.
I did, however, have trouble with being different. In the years before I went to school, I remember only a slight amount of talk about my toes. My younger brother loved to count his toes and then mine; at first he was jealous that I had more, but he soon loved embarrassing me by inviting anyone who came to the house to look. I ran and hid when possible. When I went to school, my feet were firmly covered up until second grade when my younger brother appeared on the playground at noon and spread the news. I was immediately bullied into removing my shoes and socks. It was a three-day wonder, however. Nevertheless, I kept my feet snuggly covered throughout elementary school. I do remember conversations with my parents, though.
“Why do I have too many toes?” I would ask my mother while she watched the evening news. This conversation usually happened when I took my shoes and socks off, preliminary to donning pajamas.
“You have just the right amount,” she would always reply. “For you, you have exactly the right number of toes. Now, be quiet and let me listen to Walter.” Walter was CBS’s Cronkite, a first name personality in our house.
“But no one else has twelve.”
“No one that you know,” she would say. “Now, hush.”
It was true that I didn’t know anyone else with extra toes. In the era of the internet, I suppose I would have joined some kind of polydactyl friends forum, but that was far in the future. I had heard my parents discuss with friends whether twelve toes ran in our family. They firmly insisted that it did not, which made me wonder whether I was family or not, as I certainly had twelve toes.
I wondered if it changed how they thought of me. My brother surely was the preferred child, and I thought maybe it was because he had normal feet. But, later, when we got a baby sister with the regular number of digits, I realized that it was because he was male and felt – at least for a while – that I had two defects instead of one.
Junior high was tough, because three times a week there were mandatory gym classes, mandatory gym uniforms, and mandatory group showers. I had to disrobe, shoes, socks and all. It took the other girls a couple of weeks to discover my toes (I think we were all afraid to look at each other for a while), but then I was the wonder of Stephen Foster Junior High for about two weeks. After that, there was much more interest in discussing who needed a bra and how often you should wash your hair.
Once in a great while, my toes came up. When we had biology in high school and were talking about mutations in reference to evolution, my classmate Emily used my toes as an example of a mutation. Mr. Stanton nicely said that maybe six-toed people would have an existential advantage in the long run. I surely did not agree with him.
In retrospect, there were some advantages. As a teenager, I never got into trouble by “going all the way” and ending up with a “bun in the oven.” I suppose at that age I didn’t realize it was possible to practice sex while retaining one’s socks (most girls were fairly ignorant about sex in my day), but I wasn’t taking any chances. “Fallen” girls had to spend a semester with “Aunt Mary” (which is what pregnant teenage girls did in those days, returning to school afterwards as if nothing happened). I credit my extended virginity to my toes.
I got to college in the late sixties – I avoided the sandal rage, but sex was everywhere, and no one was recommending that I lose my virginity with my socks on. Fortunately, young men about to score do not pay attention to your feet, at least the first time.
Reactions from young lovers varied from profound interest (can you wiggle them all?) to mild disgust (would you mind putting your sock back on?). I eventually found a man who was fazed by very little in life, including my feet, and I married him in my extra wide ivory pumps which matched my wedding dress.
We had planned to have children within a few years, but I worried about whether they would inherit my toes. There were no genetic tests, and doctors kept telling me that the anomaly was most common in African American men and children with Downs syndrome. There were no other instances in my family, and the medical people seemed to think it was a silly thing to worry about. They were used to people fretting about brain abnormalities, spina bifada, sudden infant death syndrome, miscarriage, stillbirth. I worried about none of those things. I just wanted children with ten toes.
Eventually, I had two boys who were perfect in every way – at least until they were four and started being periodically uncontrollable (which was also normal). And once I realized that their feet were fine, I relaxed about everything else.
My little boys probably initially thought all mothers had twelve toes, but when Sam, the eldest, realized that his mother’s feet were extremely interesting to his friends, he brought a steady stream of neighborhood kids through the kitchen.
“You can’t just bring in anyone and expect me to show them my feet,” I argued after the first time.
“Why not? They think it’s neat.”
“What if I had two bellybuttons, would you ask me to take my shirt off?” It is always a mistake to argue with a five-year-old.
“Do you? Do you have two bellybuttons? I wanna see!” As I said, it is always a mistake to argue with a child.
Over time, life was so busy that my feet became a non-issue to those around me, but never to me. I bought sandals that only showed my first three toes. I went to the neighborhood pool with shoes on to watch the kids, and we vacationed in the mountains, where my husband and I wore hiking boots. I overcame arguments to rent a cottage on Cape Cod and walk the beach.
The kids grew up and we aged and my toes were seldom a topic of conversation, but I never forgot about them. Sometimes when people found out about my anomaly, they confided their own defects. Often, their disclosures were things like being born with one kidney or having their heart on the wrong side – nothing that showed. Once, though, a neighbor pulled down the neck of her shirt and told me about a huge birthmark she had lived with until her teens. But I had always known that I was not the only one in the world born with some kind of differential from the human norm. This fact, however, did not help. Misery does not love company; misery wants to be put out of its pain.
Where is all this going? You may well ask. To people who don’t own them, twelve toes are interesting for about five minutes. But there is an epiphany here, at least for me, and answers in life are so rare and fleeting, I just wanted to share.
Hiking along a gorge in upstate New York one fall afternoon when I was in my late sixties, I tripped and felt something in my right foot snap. With my husband’s help and an improvised walking stick, I managed to mince along to the parking lot, where a trip to urgent care confirmed that the foot was broken. To be specific, I had a Jones fracture, which is a break in the bone on the outside of the foot, and I learned that such breaks can be tricky. The urgent care folks, after supplying me with temporary foot gear, referred me to an ankle and foot specialist whom I saw the next day.
Dr. Shea was fascinated by my feet. “You don’t see such uniform polydactyly often,” he said with appreciation. “I bet your toes never gave you any problem.”
Whoa, I thought, only every day of my life. But I agreed that my feet had always functioned splendidly until the day before. We discussed wearing a boot versus surgery, decided on the boot, and I was looking at a hobbled life for about six weeks.
“We’d probably fix that now,” Dr. Shea said, nodding at my feet, “those toes. Most parents would insist on it, and we can do it, but it often creates problems when you have to reshape the whole foot. You were better off leaving it the way it was.”
“Always embarrassed me,” I admitted.
The stout bald doctor nodded. “Well, I bet it would, but thought you might like to know you were better off not having anything done.”
Better off. I doubted it and even asked him if they could still do it. Dr. Shea said he wouldn’t do it or recommend that it be done – it would be very difficult on my elderly bones and muscles, plus I would be off my feet for months. I quickly agreed.
You were better off. These words echoed all the way home. Maybe it was true. Easier to worry about your toes than all the other things in life. Easier to think about how to hide your toes than your psychoses and neuroses. Better. But the funny thing was, I stopped worrying about my toes after that, and when my sons’ wives got pregnant I started worrying about spina bifada instead of toes. All of which makes almost no sense. This is not a lesson or parable, just an observation. Perhaps it’s an epiphany of sorts, and probably not a very objective one. It’s my epiphany and I’m sharing it. Because, as I said, they are so rare.
When I Come To Be Old 