"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