by Robert Hoge
Mom pointed out that the doctors would be moving my eyes again. “If they damage the nerves around your eyes, there’s a chance you might lose your eyesight,” she said.
“Why can’t they move one eye at a time?” I asked. “And be super careful?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Dad said. “It’s one operation, Robert. They have to do all the work at the same time.”
Michael, who had mostly been quiet until then, suddenly piped up. “What use is looking pretty if he can’t even see himself?”
I paused at that, and everyone turned to look at me. I still don’t know exactly how or why, but that one question brought all of my thinking into focus.
In that instant I owned my face.
I could trust myself to the doctors who had done so many wonderful things to get me so far. I could give them the chance to move me a bit closer to normal, risks, rewards, and all. Or I could take my chances and make my ugly way in a sometimes ugly world just the way I was.
Until then, almost everything in my life had been governed by what I looked like. But I’d had no ownership of that. I’d had no say in my appearance and no control over what was decided in the name of my face.
When my brother made his comment, I suddenly understood what it really meant to make that choice for myself, to take ownership over my face.
I decided right then that I was not going to have that operation. I might never be a pretty sculpture, but I was done with being the doctors’ clay.
I knew I was ugly. But everyone is uglier than they think. We are all more beautiful too.
We all have scars only we can own.
An operation to fix my face would mean leaving behind this horrid, bumpy, uneven, unequal, disquieting, disfigured, disturbing face that made me who I am. Sometimes people would say to me that I’d managed to do quite well despite my appearance and my disability. And I started to realize that I hadn’t become who I was despite those things. There was just as much chance I had become who I was because of my ugliness and my disability.
“I don’t want to have this operation,” I told my parents. “I don’t want to have any more operations. Ever.”
It was me, my legs, and my ugly face against the world.
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