Unusual tastes: nature or nurture?

My daughter Ma’ayan wears boots with a connecting bar when she sleeps. She was born with bilateral clubfeet, but a series of casts, the first when she was only hours old, and an achilles tendon surgery have successfully corrected the condition. Her boots and bar help ensure that her feet do not revert to their original position (toes pointed in and the soles facing up). Originally, she wore the boots 22 hours a day. As she became more mobile, standing and walking without the boots served to correct and preserve the position of her feet, so she was allowed to wear them fewer hours a day.

Interestingly, Ma’ayan has not once complained about having to wear her boots. She only recently balked at wearing them when she formed a large blister on the top of her foot that broke and bled. We stopped using the boots to let her foot heal. We expected we might face resistance when it came time to start using them again, but she surprised us: Last week as we put her to bed, she told us her foot was better and asked us to put her boots on. Though she has spent as much of her life wearing the shoes as not wearing them, I suspect that even under these circumstances it’s still pretty unusual for a nearly three-year old to ask to wear them. But then Ma’ayan has always been a child of unusual tastes.

Ma’ayan will sit quietly through an entire meal and decline all food if it does not look appetizing. (In her world, whether something looks appetizing is directly related to the degree to which the item is bread, cheese, or carrots.) And she will not complain nor ask for food later. She has also cried to be put down for a nap – and not because she was sleepy. She simply wanted some time to sit alone in her crib in the near dark and “read” a book. Ma’ayan appears to recall nearly every piece of information ever said in her presence, but her immutability and lack of response to the calling of her name made me seriously question her hearing. (It seems to be perfect.) All I can do is wonder whether she is more stubborn mule or serene Buddha.

My father-in-law, a psychoanalyst, considers her sedate and contemplative tendencies to be the result of her casts and boots and bar. My husband and I, on the other hand, have thanked our lucky stars since nearly the beginning that her twin Hannah, a study in entropy, was not the one we had to get into lace up shoes with a bar. It’s likely that Ma’ayan’s nature is a combination of her genes and her circumstances, but I like to get at least as much credit as the boots for who she is.