Feet Only a Mother Could Love

Susie chose feet.

TLC has a program called My Unique Family and one of the episodes is about a Mom and her two kids, a twenty-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy – all of whom have ectrodactyly, a genetic disorder in which the digits of the hands and feet fuse and twist together.
“It’s sometimes called lobster claw disease,” the Mom tells us. She works as a local news anchor. She shows us these hollow plastic hands she shoved on whenever she would be on camera until her producer told her to forego them. Their hands look like they’re perpetually cramped inside a sock puppet, and the mother spoke about surgery the children had when they were young, to separate what digits were distinct enough to be separated like surgery on conjoined twins.
She and her daughter seem very well-adjusted with it, but the son is another story.
The Mom tries taking him to a meeting/support group for people with disabilities, but all the members are in wheelchairs. None of them have ectrodactyly, and you can see the son thinking, “Whatever else is wrong with me, I can walk, you know, Mom,” but he puts a good spin on it after the meeting and gamely talks about not letting disabilities get in your way but in this very flat way. He knows that’s the right answer, but he doesn’t quite believe it.
And it got me thinking, how would you keep your balance? But I guess they all get used to it. The mother had a barely discernible limp to her gait, and the kids didn’t at all. They didn’t mention walking from what I remember.
The mother is dating a surfer, and he takes the son out surfing one day. The camera gets a shot of his feet. The big toe curves toward the others, which are also rearing back in a reciprocal, uniform curve as if they were forming a clamp. I don’t think we don’t see any shots of him on the surfboard or actually surfing, just scenes of them waxing the boards, and then the camera cuts to an interview with the Mom.
The saddest scene is when he’s in the garage, working on his bike, trying to turn a socket wrench on the rear tire. He tries it with one hand but can’t get a good grip, so he then places both of them on top of the wrench and putting all his weight against it, but the wrench falls out of place, and he collapses on top of the bike. He picks himself up, gets on his knees and just stares at where the wrench was.
It reminded me of Giant Size X-Men number one, the first appearance of Kurt Wagner, Nightcrawler. Born with three fingers apiece on his hands and feet, a prehensile tail, and blue fur, his family seemingly abandoned him at birth, leaving him to be taken in by a gypsy carnival where he worked as an acrobat with his adopted sister and had a rather pleasant if unorthodox childhood.
When we first see him, he is fleeing from a mob until Professor Xavier stops them, and then, despite his loving and accepting home life, the first thing he blurts out, after Xavier invites him to America, is "Can you make me normal?"