"Nothing is perfect in this whole world"

"I hate myself," she said.

We were lying in her bed. It was bedtime, and she had asked me to sleep beside her.

"Why do you hate yourself?"

"Because I don't have a left ear."

It has been troubling her especially lately. The operation didn't come out as well as she had hoped. Her left ear--her "fake ear" as she called it the other day--doesn't have the definition of her right ear, and most importantly, it doesn't have the "hole."

In the car riding home today, she had repeated the question she has asked in a hundred different ways recently: Why me?

"Everybody has a left ear but me."

"Well, not everybody, Sweetie. Some people don't."

"Does everybody have the two pieces like my ear?"

Her ear, before the operation, consisted just of a little bit of lobe and the beginning of a structure at the top.

"I think so, Sweetie. Everybody starts that way and then the two pieces grow together."

"Why didn't mine grow?" she had wanted to know.

"We don't know for sure," I had said. "Something interfered with the developmental process. It was probably something from the environment. Pollution, some chemical. Something that got into your mother's body and then interfered with the development of your left ear."

"I hate my mother," she had responded. "My biological mother."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because she did drugs," she had said.

"Sweetie, we don't know that. You can't blame your mother. It wasn't her fault. It could have been something in the water that she drank or in the air that she breathed. She couldn't control that."

"Water is clean," Maia had said.

"Not always. Sometimes there's something in it, and you don't know. Look, remember what we talked about before. About how it isn't the things that are perfect about us that you learn from but the things that are imperfect? Well, your ear is going to be what you learn from. It's what makes you special, different. Because of your ear, you have a perspective on things nobody else has. But hating your mother, that isn't a good place to end up, Sweetie. You have to keep working at it."

I tried to go back to that idea now, that we learn from our imperfections. But not very successfully.

"You shouldn't hate yourself because of your ear, Sweetie."

"All the world is dying," she said. "The sky, the sun, the animals. All because of my ear."

I laughed.

"You should love yourself because of your ear, Sweetie, not hate yourself."

"You should love yourself because you hate yourself?"

It didn't make much sense to me either. I gave up trying to work on the thought.

"Nothing is perfect, Sweetie. Like your ear. Nothing is perfect."

"That's true," she said. "Nothing is perfect in this whole world."

John, Monday, January 24, 2011

Maia asks about why her parents gave her up

We were driving to Big City Diner for breakfast. On Saturdays, she has class at a place that's near there.

She was asking about her ear. She's been talking about it a lot recently. She had asked whether it was wrong for people to tease her about her ear, and I had told her that it was.

"Is it my fault?" she asked.

"No, it's not your fault, Sweetie. It's because of a defect in your cells, or it was something that happened while you were growing before you were born."

She thought about this for a while.

"Did my other mother know that I was missing an ear?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Yes," she continued on her own thought, "because she saw me when I was born."

"Yes," I agreed.

"Do you miss your mother?" I asked her.

"No," she said.

"Because you didn't know her,"

"Yes," she said.

She was quiet for awhile.

"Why did she just throw me away?" she asked. "Why did she give me to the orphanage? It's like she just dumped me."

I decided to start videotaping the conversation then, because I didn't trust my memory to get it right, and I wanted her to have a record of the first time she asked about this. I will post the video when I can figure out how to do that.

Parts of it went something like this.

"We don't know why she decided to give you up. And we don't know whose decision it was. You had a father, too. Maybe it was his decision."

"Did they have children after me?"

"We don't know. But they had children before you. Two sons."

"They were already there when I was born?"

"Yes."

"They took them home?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't they take me home?"

"We don't know. But it had something to do with your ear."

"Did the other children have ears?"

"Yes. They were normal. That's what the medical records said."

"Would they have taken me home if I had an ear?"

"Yes. Probably."

"Is my other mother a bad person?"

"No. We don't know why she did what she did but she must have had a reason."

"Did the other children see me in the hospital?"

"Your brothers? We don't know. But they must have known that you were born."

She was quiet for a while.

At some point, she asked if I were videotaping, I admitted that i was, and she gave me a little push back on that.

"Do you want to go there someday?

"Yes," she said. "But Mommy said we can't go because we don't speak Kazakh."

"We can get an interpreter," I said.

Well--it went something like that, anyhow.

John, Saturday, January 14, 2011