What A Story!!

 Just read this beautiful story and thought I'd share.

Dear Mrs. Bluth,

I have been an avid reader of your column since I was twelve years old and always meant to tell you how much your advice, although unrelated to my own issues, helped get me past many dark hours of my early teens and twenties, and helped me develop the courage to do for myself what no one else did for me.  I was not a physically abused child, but I was a child of abusive neglect.  I wasn’t a woman beaten and shunned; however, I shared with her a broken body, marred and ugly.  I wasn’t a person afflicted with mental deficiencies and limitations but I was made to feel less than human and had no sense of self-value or worth.  Yet, your words reached out to me even as you directed them to those who wrote to you with their pain.  You planted in a young girl the first seeds of self-respect, supportive encouragement and the belief that I, too, was worthy of happiness and that I could achieve that goal.

I was born the eleventh child in a very chassidishe family and if weather was any omen, I entered the world in a blizzard on the coldest night ever remembered.  My mother’s doctor could not make it to the hospital in time to deliver me and, with a skeleton staff in house, an intern with no experience pulled me into the world with the punishing pulls of forceps clamped around my head and face.  As the nurses cleaned me up, the damage he caused became evident.  The left side of my head and face was hideously indented, my left eye almost pushed back into its socket and the bridge of my nose collapsed onto itself from the pressure.  The nurse bundled me up so as to try to hide the malformation from my mother, but the blanket slipped away and my mother fainted upon seeing me.  Needless to say, everyone was repulsed by my ugliness, believing that I was a neshama that had to return to atone for some sin I had committed in a previous life. Like Cain, I was branded a misfit, hidden from the world until I was three and then made to endure taunts, bullying and worse thereafter as I began kindergarten.

I can’t ever recall being hugged or kissed by anyone, least of all my father.  He viewed me as a curse on the family, sent as a punishment for something he did. My early and young childhood was a blur of hateful comments at best and punishing treatment via emotional deprivation at worst.  When my father benched my brothers and sisters before kiddush on Friday night, he would skip past me and onto the youngest one(s), as if I wasn’t there.  When gifts were given out, everyone got new things, but I got someone else’s hand-me-downs.  Birthdays were a celebration for each child, with my mother’s home-baked chocolate cake and presents and a happy dinner with the entire family around the table to celebrate the day.  Mine was marked with a store-bought cupcake packed in my lunch bag as I sat by myself as the other girls snickered and pointed at me during lunch break.

As I grew, my deformities became more pronounced – the skin around my sunken eye stretched, and the eye took on a downward slant so that my eye looked like it was melting over my cheek.  My nose grew bulbous out of my flat bridge and there was a pronounced gully from my left temple down to my jaw. On the left side of my face I looked like a hideous, deformed ogre; the only normal trait my face possessed was the ability shed tears – and I did that almost daily.  Then, I started reading your responses to the lost and tormented and I often heard you speaking to me, personally.  I learned not to see myself through other people’s eyes, not to measure myself by how others value me, but rather, to understand that beauty is in every person and that we are each custom-made by Hakodosh Boruch Hu, with special gifts and talents. I grew an invisible inch each week when I read your column and began to dream of a chance for a happy life.
As my older brothers and sisters got married, the reality that I never would began to take root.  As I was passed over with most everything else in life, I was left home as my younger sister got married and then again as the youngest, my brother, also took a wife.  I walked through the house like a shadow, my parents looking at me like I was a burden and doing their best to avoid me.  Being the way I was, I could not find a job, I had no friends and I was totally miserable at home.  So, at age 23, I concocted a story that I had received an invitation to spend the summer with an old classmate in Israel and my parents simply nodded their heads and encouraged me to stay on if I liked it there.  On a sunny day in June, I packed my bags, settled personal business and then boarded an El Al flight for the greatest adventure of my life.

I was shocked and overjoyed to find work and acceptance in a medical facility for wounded soldiers, almost as soon as I arrived in Eretz Yisroel.  I became fast friends with the people I worked with, who did not understand why I tried to hide my left side.  One day, a badly burned soldier looked at me as I was tending to his wounds, noticing how I burrowed the left side of my face into my neck.  Before I could move away, he said I was foolish for trying to hide and that what he saw was a beautiful and caring young woman who, unlike himself, had every possibility to live a happy and purposeful life without any need for shame.  His words brought tears to my eyes and I had to quickly leave the room.  As I stood in a corner in the hallway, a doctor whom I had assisted a few times

before, came over to me. Oren, a reconstructive surgeon, spoke in a gentle voice and asked me if he could be of help and, in spite of my protests, insisted on offering his surgical services to reconstruct the damage on my face.  He believed that he could successfully reconstruct the damaged left side to appear normal and balanced with the right side.  When I explained I could not cover the exorbitant expense of such a surgery, he told me that in Israel that wasn’t a problem.  So he scheduled me for surgery.

As I was wheeled into the operating room, I was overwhelmed with fright but the love of the staff who saw me as an equal and accepted me unconditionally enveloped me. The surgery took ten hours and I spent another four in recovery.  When I came to, most of my face and head was wrapped in bandages and I could only see through my right eye.  When it was time for the bandages to be removed, I was terrified. I sat up in the reclining chair as Oren snipped away at the outer layers of the bandages until I could feel the air on my skin.  A mirror was placed it front of me, and there staring back, was a face that was understandably swollen and stitched but looked even and symmetrical!  For the first time, my tears were tears of pure joy.

Each passing day proved a wonder. A month and a half after the surgery, I was almost completely healed and my friends presented me with a lovely assortment of cosmetics to cover the light scarring which would eventually disappear.  Now four months post surgery, the face that stares back at me in the mirror is the face I was always meant to have, not in vanity but with humble gratitude, a beautiful and happy face looking forward to a bright and joyous life.  Oren is a constant in my life and, just yesterday, he asked to marry me and, needless to say, I accepted.
When I shared the news with my family, all I got was what I always got from them, a deafening silence.  Since Oren was not chassidish, my father wanted nothing to do with us.  My mother, however, whispered into the phone that she would come to the wedding and that she wished me nothing but happiness.  Those were the first loving words I had heard from my mother and I was overwhelmed with emotion.

So now it’s my turn to show hakoras hatov to the Rebono Shel Olam for all the wondrous miracles He has blessed me with: a second family of loving friends, a loving man who saw beauty in me even when it was hidden behind a mask of ugliness and the gift of a whole and normal face.  It behooves me to share with your readers the belief that, with faith in Hashem, nothing is impossible and that we have the ability to achieve any goal .