My kid is always moving. Sometimes the therapist part of my brain worries about it: does he have ADHD? Does he have sensory issues? Should I get his primary reflexes checked? Is he anxious? Is he just an 8-year-old boy?

My son had a far simpler answer the other night.

We had watched a family movie, and the credits were playing with a high beat song. K jumped up and started dancing, as per usual any time music is playing. I said something like, “Aren’t you tired yet?” And he said, “I can’t help it, I was born with happy feet!”

We both laughed and went on about the night, but it stuck with me. My son thinks he was born with happy feet. It feels so natural to him to move and dance and vibe, he has no idea that his feet were anything but happy when he was born.

In fact, K was born with a clubbed right foot. We were very lucky that the process of healing was not as invasive as most cases, but for us, our first child and a very post-partum-y experience, it was really hard. We went to Arkansas Children’s every week for a long time, then every month, then every 6 months. We were finally released when he was 5. At just a few weeks old we went weekly to get a cast put on. I remember how I sobbed when he got the first cast because it looked like it swallowed the whole bottom half of his little body and turned his foot at a very unnatural angle. I remember they told me to wait to feed him until I was there so he would be distracted while they casted him. I would drive to North Little Rock, pull over into the Barnes and Noble parking lot, pump a bottle, and then drive the rest of the way to the hospital. One time I was running behind and pumped while driving down the interstate. What a wild ride, sorry for any indecent exposure that occurred on I-630!

The hardest part was when he graduated out of casts and into the boots and bar. He had to wear the special shoes with straps connect by metal bars 23 hours a day. We had to get them just right because if they were too tight or too loose, they could rub blisters and cause a whole host of other issues. I dreaded taking those shoes off and putting them back on every night. I was anxious I would do it wrong, or I wouldn’t notice when he was outgrowing them and needed a bigger size. And I hated how constricted he was.  

That kid built some leg muscles though. He would fling the bars up and down so fast and kick his little feet as much as he could. One time he nailed Shawn with them right in the forehead and we really worried for a bit that Shawn had a concussion.

I couldn’t wear him in a sling like I always thought I would, the bars wouldn’t fit. I cried so much about that. Looking back now it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but at the time, I really grieved it. I had pictured wearing him while I did chores, going for walks and holding him close against my chest with the sling. I got two of those things at baby showers and only used one of them once.

He was a good-natured baby though, never seemed to be in pain. He was just always very tired after a tightening or new cast. At a certain point he graduated to only wearing the bars at night and then at 2  was able to be free! We continued checks until he was 5 and now we just keep an eye on the foot. Looking at him, you’d never know.

I say that, but one time in an airport, someone asked me if he had been born with a clubbed foot. She was an orthopedic specialist and could tell somehow. This was only like 2 years ago and I panicked a bit thinking he had digressed and we were going to have to start all over.

That was one thing they always told us: If we graduate too soon and he regresses, we have to start all over with casts, surgery and boots and bar again. It was one thing to hamper a 6-month-old with bars, but to do that to a (highly) active big kid? I can’t imagine.

While I would never want to go through the difficulty of weekly trips to the hospital, tightening and untightening those crazy boots and bar every night, and dodging flailing metal bars, the thing I always go back to that makes my heart ache with dread the most, is how red and angry his feet always were.

The shoes were a hard leather and each time we removed them, his feet were red, swollen and painful looking. It hurt me so deep. His feet genuinely looked angry.

So, when K told me he was born with happy feet the other night, it hit me because that is just not the truth.

K has little to no memory of all of it. He just knows he has feet that love to dance. When music plays, they move, and he moves. Every little bit of him moves.

He’s a happy kid, he laughs big and feels big. When he was in nursery at daycare, everyone told me how happy he was. Other parents would comment and want to take him home because he was so happy.

So, how does K know happy, when his feet were anything but that?

Honestly, I don’t have an answer. It wasn’t me, because I was an anxious ball of postpartum freak-out at the time. It wasn’t medical science, because while our doctors were fantastic, the process of healing was hard and harsh.

As a therapist, I see so many people define themselves by the hard things they go through, the bad things that happen. They become “abuseable” “worthless” “abandoned.” They learn to be angry, lonely, self-reliant. The things we go through change us, it seems.

So, why are my kid’s feet so happy when their first two years were so painful?

Maybe because they were loved in their anger?

We rubbed his feet with lotion almost every night. We gave extra attention to his feet every day. We put him in soccer as soon as we could. He was never treated like his feet were angry, even though they were. The trauma didn’t define him. The feet didn’t stay angry, even though they had every right to be.

The compassion defined him, not the trauma.

I think K may be right after all. He was born with happy feet. Maybe we all were. And even though life immediately handed him many experiences and messages to the contrary, K has decided he has happy feet and so he does. He chooses to dance, sometimes on beat, sometime not. Most of it is interpretive. Sometimes he’s actually really good! Other times he just looks like he has Tourette’s….

Maybe we were all born with happy feet, happy hearts that flow in freedom. Life hasn’t been kind to many of us. We’ve learned to be something else and think it’s just the way we always were. Extending a little compassion to ourselves doesn’t change the trauma, but it does change the identity. Compassion allows us to choose how we are defined.

K chooses to dance. I think I want to grow up to be like him.