Maia talks about God and her ear

"But it's my choice," Maia insisted.

On August 4th, Kristina had shown me a You Tube piece she had found on Dr. Brent, an incredible surgeon in the Bay Area who creates ears out of the cartilage between a child's ribs. We had emailed his office in May of 2004, just after we had gotten back from Kazakhstan. He had told us then that we needed to wait for the surgery until Maia turned 6.



The piece Kristina found re-energized me. The doctor's technique is remarkable. He is also a sculptor, and he literally sculpts the armature for an ear out of cartilage. He inserts it beneath the skin, lets it take root there, then separates it from the skull in a second operation and grafts skin behind the ear. A remarkable process.

On August 5th, I had shown the short to Maia. She was interested by it, but it scared her a little, too. She wanted to know if it hurt and wouldn't look at it a second time.

But I had gotten the go ahead from her, and so I re-contacted Dr. Brent's office. It took a while for them to respond. When they did, about mid-month, they told me, among other things, that they needed photos of Maia's ear. So I took some on August 20th--the ones you see here. In the course of that, I asked Maia for another shot, she refused, and I got annoyed with her.

"Okay, then," I said, putting my camera away.



A couple of days later, we were talking about going to the mainland for Maia's ear and other reasons, and she said, "No, you said, no."

"You mean, your ear?"

"Yes," she said.

"No, Maia, I didn't mean that," I said, appalled at what I had wrought. Evidently, she thought I had nixed the ear operation because I had gotten angry at her.

I thought about how to fix this. The next day I said, "Maia, it doesn't matter if you're a good girl or a bad girl, or how good you are, or how bad you are, if you want to fix your ear, you can fix your ear."

"But it's my choice," she said. She was animated. "It's my ear."

"Yes," I said.

"And if I want to fix my ear, or I don't want to fix my ear, it's my choice."

"Yes, Sweetie," I said. "It's your choice."



It's been a very difficult time. School started up again at the end of July, and almost overnight, Maia was exceedingly difficult to deal with. She can be patronizing and contemptuous, and my thought was that she was giving us a taste of how tightly the circle can be drawn against her.

And then the weekend before last, we had more bad news. Maia has a serious underbite, and we took her to a specialist for an evaluation. He told us that a severe underbite was in the range of a certain number of centimeters. Her underbite is twice that. She has a gap between her upper and lower incisors that you can fit a finger in because she can't close her jaws. More of the same complex of things associated with her ear.

When my mother and step-father were here at the end of July for my birthday, Maia had a run-in with Smokey, one of our cats. They have a certain amount of sibling rivalry because Smokey used to be the favored child.

"Pets are God's little friends," my step-father said.

"Where is God?" Maia asked. "Is God there, or there, or there?" she said, pointing at spots on the ceiling. "I don't see him."

We have to have faith, I guess.

Today, I picked up the photos of her ear from WalMart. I had tried to email them, but they wouldn't go through, and so I had them printed out. But I had delayed in picking them up.

Tonight, when I joined Maia in bed, I asked, "Do you want to fix your ear?"

"Yes," she said, without hesitation. "This weekend?" she wanted to know.

"No, not this weekend," I said. "It will be some months."

She experimented with possibilities, ending up with March. "Is that far?" she asked. "No," she said, answering herself, "December."

John, September 2, 2008

ps The day I posted this, we mailed the photos to Dr. Brent's office. Maia and Kristina had come down to pick me up, and Maia was outside the car as I approached. The mailbox was right there on the sidewalk, too.

"This is the letter that we're sending to your ear Doctor. It has the photos in it," I told her putting it in her hand. "Do you want to mail it," I asked.

She took it from me, and played with putting it in the mouth of the mailbox. She almost dropped it in, but took it back. Then she put it in, all the way at the back, and dropped it into the mailbox.

John, September 4, 2008