I remember when I was pregnant that my fears weren’t about the pain of childbirth, breastfeeding or the unknown. Instead, I worried about the small stuff.

Several weeks after bringing Ethan home my mother-in-law visited and stayed with us to help. The kind of help that sits to the side and tells you everything you’re doing wrong and how she would do it. There was one thing she helped with and that was teaching me how to trim a newborns finger nails. I was terrified of using clippers and being a new mom I wasn’t aware they made these little curved scissors that work wonders on little bitty fingers.

Words cannot describe my fear of possibly hurting this small being. After the first year of Ethan’s life I became more comfortable and he became more active. As those of you with little ones know it’s like hitting a moving target.

Fast forward to present day. Ethan is almost 6 years old. At what age do they get over being afraid of getting their nails trimmed? Seriously? The kid is Mr. Drama when the clippers come out. You’d think I’d previously ripped his entire nail out by the way he acts. Or in his case performs.

I’m deeply afraid some day this will all turn into some freaky foot fetish. I have dreams about it at night - picturing him sitting with a therapist saying that his problems all began when his mother tortured him with the nail clippers. That is what he screams out when I trim his nails, that I’m “killing him.”

My belief is that all this started when he was younger and my mother would tease him saying she was going to bite his toes. He’d completely lose it, sometimes bringing tears and more drama. She will deny the relation between the two, but I see some coincidence there.

Whatever his own fears are, I’m fairly certain he inherited this anxiety from me. He doesn’t seem to sweat the big stuff, but the small things are constantly on his mind.

For instance, today he asked me if the trash man came on Christmas Day. I explained that they did not pick up trash on holidays. When I asked why he wondered that, he said that it wasn’t fair that the people who had pick-up scheduled for that day missed their turn.

The small stuff matters to him. That’s why the finger nails mattered to me.