Nail Biting

Yes, perhaps it shouldn't surprise that Imogen is a nail biter. After all, she's such an easy, relaxed, passive sort of person. Never gets riled up about anything minor. *cough*table settings*cough*

So yeah, her hands are just hideous too. The nails are short and jagged and she drags and scrapes her teeth on her nail beds (past her cuticles) so they are constantly splitting. She has hangnails all over the place, they're all scabby, not to mention painful. She's always asking for bandaids to shield her poor fingers from herself. I need to get something perfectly nasty to put on them in an effort to help her quit. She says she tries to, but I know how absent minded habits like that be. I figure if she really wants to, maybe the nasty tasting stuff will help. If she doesn't, I know Imogen. She'll lick it off for a while then figure out that she can wash it off.

But today, this all took a rather unpleasant twist. She has some minor but painful toe injury from stubbing her toe on something. As I was examining the little wound, I noticed something odd. A familiar jaggedness to her toenails.

"Do you bite your toenails?" I asked, figuring that she just plays hard and her toenails break off often. She didn't answer but just stared at me with suddenly wide eyes. I couldn't believe it. "Seriously??" I asked, "You honestly bite your toenails? Really?"

She finally said very quietly, "Yes."

I was aghast, "Seriously??" I stared at them. It was quite obvious now. They looked very much like her fingernails. I searched my memory, trying to think of when I last clipped them. "Seriously?" I said again, still trying to wrap my brain around this one. "When??" I asked, realizing I had never seen this particular activity.

"Not as often as my fingernails," she said.

Oh, no kidding. That's a huge comfort. I'm still picturing her somewhere hunched over with her foot grasped tightly in both hands and held at her mouth as she gnaws away. I tried to deliver a suitable lecture about the germs that are under both fingernails and *shudder* toenails.

"Well, I didn't know," she said defensively.

I'm sitting here wondering if somehow I caused this. Did I neglect her nails, driving her to chew them off in desperation? Did she ask me at some point to cut them and I forgot to? Do we perhaps not own enough pairs of nail clippers?

She's started chewing on her hair recently. That's all I need.