Jason lives in Portland, OR. They are passionate about telling stories that stir the heart, help us heal, and wake us up. This piece was crafted with excerpts from an upcoming memoir. Connect at: www.jasonmglover.com or @Jason_M_Glover
“Cleft” is the nonfiction winner of the 2019 Prose & Poetry Contest, selected by Benjamin Busch.
10.
This is how surgery works:
“Count down with me: ten, nine, eight…”
It’s the anesthesiologist, holding a scented gas mask—strawberry—over my face. My body, horizontal on the table, covered only in a child’s hospital gown, the rough fabric displaying a pattern of marching teddy bears. Me fearing that I’ll never wake up, or even worse, wake up too soon. The doctors ready their tools, faces obscured with surgical masks. I recognize Dr. Newman, patiently waiting for the gas to kick in so he can cut my face into place.
“That’s it. Deep breaths. Seven, six, five…”
With each number, with each strawberry breath, my field of vision divides, and then divides again, into quarters, eighths, sixteenths—the sea of doctor faces staring down at me, repeating over and over and over again in a giant grid.
“Good, keep breathing. Four, three, two…”
Each little square in that grid winks out to dark brown static, until only a single tiny square of vision remains. And just as the anesthesiologist says, “One,” that last little square turns static and consciousness fades to black.
This is surgery number two. A thin tube placed in the right nostril to prevent the nasal cavity from closing itself off as it develops. An incision on the left hip, pilfered for a shard of bone. Upper gums sliced open, and that little hip shard placed inside. A bone graft. The slice of hip will fuse to the gum ridge and provide better support for the roots of still developing adult teeth. One adult tooth is deemed superfluous and removed before it can grow in. Gums then stitched up with dissolving sutures. Upper lip cut open, reshaped, sewn back together. Hip bandaged.
Everything right back where it belongs.
Hours later, I’m waking up. Regaining awareness but still unable to speak or move. Terrified. So thirsty, my throat is gravel, but I can’t ask for a drink. Overwhelmed with nausea. I want to see if my father is around but can’t move my neck. I see only my gown, the metal rails of the hospital bed, an IV snaking away from my arm, and fluorescent lighting. A nurse sees me struggling and calms me down, telling me to just lie still and be patient. Everything will feel all right again before long and they’ll be taking me to my room to recover for a few days.
The hospital stay passes as a fever dream of pain, visiting family, and handwritten, construction-paper get-well cards sent by my many first cousins.
Mom eventually arrives, and my body softens in her presence. My fears soothed by the familiar murmur of her voice. Dad is angry at her, but I don’t know why. After I get out of the hospital I’m headed to her apartment for the summer.
At some point a nurse asks me if I want potato chips, and I nod weakly, yes. She leaves and returns, not bearing a bag of chips as I expected, but with a bowl of chip-mush and a large syringe. The nurse explains, spraying a salty syringe of liquefied chips into my mouth like I’m a baby bird, how I’m not to eat any solid foods for two months. She shows my mother how to use the syringe to feed me.
When the nurse leaves again, Dad, concerned about my aftercare, hounds Mom: “You better follow those instructions. I didn’t have my insurance cover all of this just so you can mess it up.”
They fight while I try to sleep.
The pain in my hip is excruciating, and I limp to the bathroom at night, the IV trailing behind me, always crying. In the bathroom I see my face, some kind of medical nightmare. My lip swollen to five times its normal size, held from bursting by blood-crusted stitches. I offer a fervent prayer, promising God anything if, please, when my lip heals this time, it can just look normal.
9.
A cleft lip looks uncivilized—there’s no way to mask your imperfect bestial nature. No way to cover it up with confession and prayer. Instead, it’s broadcast plain on your face.
Harelip.
It was a French doctor who said it first, way back in the sixteenth century. Him describing a patient with the deformity, saying it looked as if they had the “lip of a hare.” The split lip being reminiscent of wild animals like hares and other rodents.
But the term had another significance as well. In the Dark Ages, folks associated hares with the practice of witchcraft.
How it was is, people thought witches could shape-shift into hares.
And if a pregnant woman out for a forest stroll had the misfortune of being frightened by one of these devil-worshipping, black-magic-wielding were-hares, her child would be born marked. Twisted and cursed.
In German superstition, hares were known as witch animals. The ancient Hebrews considered them unclean. Early Christians were flat out forbidden from eating their meat.
Folklore also has it that hares and rabbits symbolize sexual deviance. People apparently thought that if you fornicate like an animal, you shouldn’t be surprised when your child ends up looking like one.
In the seventeenth century, the hare came to represent Satan himself. A marked baby was considered irrefutable evidence that its mother had literally fucked the Devil.
Christian artwork would sometimes depict men with clefts as monks—unfit for marriage, their only option for redemption to join a celibate religious order. Other times, in paintings of the Passion of Christ, the soldiers tormenting Jesus were depicted with clefts. Hell, there’s even artwork where it’s the Devil himself who has a cleft.
This perception of the cleft as a mark of darkness runs deep throughout human history. It transcends cultures.
Spartans and Romans believed cleft-afflicted children harbored evil spirits, abandoning such babies on Mount Taygetus, drowning them in the Tiber River, hurling them off Tarpeian Rock. Unwanted. Discarded. Thrown away.
Even today, in Uganda, a baby born with a cleft lip or palate is named Ajok. It means cursed by God.
In Nigeria, the Yoruba tribe believes the defect is inflicted by evil supernatural forces—the shame of it enough to lower a family’s social status. Among the Zulu, there’s the belief that ancestral spirits are expressing their thirst for blood through the baby’s mangled mouth. In India, many rural Hindus believe clefts are a punishment for sinful acts committed in past lives. In Chinese cultures, physical deformities are seen as an act of karma or fate.
And while it isn’t any longer that infanticide is the socially acceptable response to a craniofacial anomaly, modern surgical repairs are occasionally forbidden due to a fear of interfering with the will of the divine.
So if you’re unfortunate enough to have been born marked, maybe instead of getting your face fixed, you’re forced to grow up shunned. Performing purification rituals, fasting, appeasing angry ancestors, giving to charity, engaging in community service. Your whole life spent making up for the accident of your birth. Your mother wearing blessed amulets or protective talismans, attempting to stave off the horror of having other kids like you.
Some ancient medical practitioners even had this theory they called “maternal impressions.” They blamed the mother’s poor emotional state during pregnancy for bringing about the condition—negative feelings transmitted like poison through her blood. Or maybe she just happened to stare too long at another child born cursed, the cleft jumping like a contagion into her own womb.
In Dutch and Danish, part of the word for birthmark means mother.
8.
The summer at my mother’s is a dull static cloud of sitting indoors watching reruns with my brothers in a drab second-floor apartment situated atop a tiny town’s only convenience store. The store has a false front, like the general stores I read about in Little House on the Prairie. There’s one room filled with ceiling tiles and discarded building materials, which we aren’t supposed to go in but do anyway. Spiderwebs in the stairwell on the way up to our door. A broken window from a rowdy party my mom threw one time. The store owners yell at us if we run around too much, and the whole place smells of must and dirt. The paint all peeling away in chips.
This is the tiny town my maternal grandparents live in, where my mom grew up. The place I visited in the summer and associated with candy from the party store below; ice cream from the parlor down the street with its hulking ancient waterwheel; and apple turnovers from the rustic bakery directly across the street. But now all I can eat are those instant-breakfast packets meant for middle-aged people trying to lose weight, and eventually pudding, yogurt (without fruit), and applesauce. After a good month, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with the crust cut off.
I want to do nothing but hide inside so no one will make fun of my appearance. I’m not allowed to go swimming, but Mom takes us to the beach, where my feeding syringes double as amazing squirt guns.
I’m a baby bird with a swollen beak.
One time we go to a potluck, and I get excited on the way there, listing off all the things I’m planning on eating, before my mother reminds me that I can’t eat solid food. I’d forgotten. When we arrive I try to sneak a piece of roast ham but get caught, so someone lets me put my fingers into a cake and just lick the frosting—the only one allowed to do so.
And for that brief moment of time, sucking the frosting from my index finger, celebrating my special surgery-recovery privilege, I’m genuinely happy.
That whole summer I desperately crave any sort of solid food. Every time I see a food commercial on TV, my mouth salivates and my stomach throbs with hollow hunger. What I wouldn’t give for a single slice of pizza.
The worst part is, when my mom goes to work, my brothers and I have to go to daycare, which means kid after kid after kid of all ages doing nothing but staring and snickering behind my back. No different than the younger children who stare at me when we go to church, held in their parent’s arms, looking back at me as we stand in the pews, not understanding what they’re seeing.
Every Sunday at Mass, I pray for God to heal my lip. I feel like Pinocchio wishing upon a star. But instead of a star, it’s Jesus. And instead of wishing to become a real boy, I'm just wishing for normal lips.
But a prayer is different than a wish. Prayer isn’t make believe.
I promise God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and every saint I can think of that I’ll do anything. Anything, please, anything in exchange for one of their miracles. Maybe my prayers aren’t working because I’m a bad person. Maybe it’s a punishment for my sins.
Please, Lord Jesus Christ, help me. You healed that Roman soldier’s ear, so I know you do this sort of thing.
I pretend that I’m given the power to heal my lip, but consequently Jesus asks me if I think selfishly wasting a miracle on myself would be its best use. So, feeling guilty, I tell him to help someone who needs it more. Like someone dying of cancer.
My priest died of lung cancer. But before he died, homily after homily was devoted to lamenting the fact that not enough young men were joining the priesthood.
Maybe I should be a priest, I think. Maybe I was marked for a reason. Maybe this is all part of God’s plan.
While my prayers go unanswered, my lip goes on healing even without divine intervention.
As summer ends, it comes time for the doctors to take out the stitches and tube running down my tear duct. The crusty knots snipped, the threads pulled out, the feeling of something sliding out of you from where it shouldn’t have been. Then that same feeling, amplified, as they remove the tiny tube, grabbed way up inside your nostril with something approximating pliers and pulled out, it coming away a flimsy spaghetti-noodle strand caked with blood clots, like a root running through clods of dirt. All these surgical remnants removed and tossed away.
But still, the doctors say, only eat soft foods.
7.
In some parts of the world, ritualistic scarification is a coming of age ceremony. A way to further differentiate gendered sexuality. Necessary to wean boys away from the softness of their mothers. To turn them into hardened men. The Kaningara of Papua New Guinea believe that the act of skin cutting removes any remaining traces of the mother’s postpartum blood from the body of a boy.
The body serves as an interface between the individual and society. The ultimate arbiter between the self and the collective. Your relationship to others can be redefined with an alteration of the skin. The modifications made to your personality on display for the world to see.
Scarification is thought of as a rite of separation because it serves to mark an individual’s permanent social differentiation. Your removal from the unmarked general population, and your initiation into a separate marked group.
In our culture, more often than not, facial scars are seen as a mark of villainy. A visible reminder of who the audience should be rooting against.
The first time I noticed that familiar scar up on the silver screen was on Joaquin Phoenix, who was playing the troubled Emperor Commodus in Gladiator. I went to see the movie with a friend and spent the whole time sick with anxiety, slouched down in my seat, trying to hide my face, hoping no one else in the theater would notice the similarity.
I watched as Commodus broke down in front of his father. Sobbing over failing to live up to his expectations, lamenting feeling unloved, saying, “I searched the faces of the gods for ways to please you, to make you proud. One kind word, one full hug while you pressed me to your chest and held me tight, would have been like the sun on my heart for a thousand years. What is it in me you hate so much?”
Then he embraces dear old dad and smothers him to death.
Joaquin Phoenix wasn’t born with a full cleft lip. Never had a repair surgery, but was born with the scar nonetheless. A microform cleft, it’s called. He’s been quoted as referring to it as an act of God. Supposedly claims his mother knew the moment it happened, that she felt a sharp pain while he was in the womb.
A couple years after Gladiator, I went to see Red Dragon, having long been a fan of Silence of the Lambs. If I’d ever read the books I would have known what to expect: another villain with a cleft. This time, a serial killer named Francis Dolarhyde, a.k.a. The Tooth Fairy—the moniker derived from his oral fixations. He chewed up his victims with his dead grandmother’s misshapen dentures. His personality fissured due to childhood trauma and abuse. His other self: The Great Red Dragon.
No matter the repair surgeries, his lips still left him feeling deformed. He dated a blind girl, as she was the only one he felt comfortable enough to be vulnerable around. You know, since she couldn’t see his face.
But he still wouldn’t let her touch the scar.
He broke mirrors, unable to tolerate his own reflection. Put shards from the broken mirrors in the eyes of the families he murdered. Dolarhyde’s rituals made him a god. They were a twisted way to escape his cleft.
Towards the end of Red Dragon, regarding scars, I heard Hannibal Lecter say: “Never forget who gave you the best of them, and be grateful—our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.”
6.
When Mom and Dad gathered my two brothers and me in the living room and told us the separation was going to become a divorce, I felt my heart harden—I convinced myself it was beneath me to be upset about such a trivial thing. So my parents didn’t get along. So what? These things happen—plenty of other kids in school had divorced parents. I’d seen Step by Step on TV.
Dad sent us to group therapy, but the whole thing felt infantilizing. That wheel they handed us with little smiley faces and angry faces and frowny faces. The therapists asking us to turn the wheel to whatever emotion most represented how we felt that day. I always just chose happy, and then spaced out until the pizza arrived. The counselors spent the whole time blah-blah-blah-ing about how divorce wasn’t our fault. I already knew that. I never blamed myself. I just missed my mom.
Sometimes I’d get back to Dad’s after a weekend visit with her, and the weight of her absence would press down on my chest so hard I couldn’t sleep. Like a bubble of air was trapped inside my esophagus, building up pressure until it needed to be let out. So I’d grab a piece of paper and write heartsick poetry—I’d sit by the nightlight and write it all down, and then the tears would come.
I remember trying to verbalize that heavy feeling, and the word yearning came to me. A yearning for the past. That seemed to capture it. Wanting to go back to how things used to be, back when I could holler “Mommmm” from bed at night, and she’d come running to hold me.
I remember how Dad used to hold us more when we were little. How I’d crawl on top of him and poke his furry belly, and he’d make fart noises, and I’d laugh. How I’d cling to one of his legs while he walked, him dragging me around the room, taking me for a ride. How he’d hold each of us up by our arms in front of him, our feet on top of his feet, and march us to bed, singing: “Left, left…left, right, left. Your boots are too heavy, your belt’s too tight, your knees are swingin’ from left to right…” and then he’d toss us into bed and tickle us while we giggled.
I also remember the sound of Dad’s belt cracking on our bottoms. Him disciplining us how his own father used to discipline him. It’s what he knew about raising boys.
When Mom used to put us to bed, she’d sing, “Let’s go fly a kite up to the highest height, let’s go fly a kite, and send it soaring...” I still tear up whenever I think about that song.
Without Mom there to keep me open, I closed up—pushed away all the tender parts of myself behind the wall where men put things. But I could never hide anything there for long. It always burst out into shameful saline streams. Into snot running over my lips. And then, later, into rage that screamed hoarse from my throat.
I don’t know when it is that boys grow away from receiving touch from their fathers that’s not being slapped across the face or spanked. I do know that after Mom left, when Dad dropped us off at daycare in the predawn before heading off to work at the chemical plant, he’d say, “Okay, boys, family hug.” And then he’d swoop his arms around the three of us, pulling us close while we tried to squirm out of his grip. Eventually he gave up on the whole family hug thing—I wonder if that made him sad.
I know my dad loved us all so much. I know he worked hard raising us; he taught us to work hard, too. Always handy with tools, he built us a swing set from scratch—with a slide and a fort and everything. But a mother, a father is not.
I’ve never seen my father cry.
5.
In Dutch the word for birthmark is moedervlek. Moeder for mother. Vlek for spot.
Mother-spot.
Folklore had it that maternal impressions were responsible for congenital birth defects. Maybe it’d be the sudden fear of some animal—a hare, perhaps. Or maybe it’d be dwelling on problematic thoughts—thoughts better left alone.
Toxic emotions—fear, anger, longing—passed on like poison-tinged lullabies.
The ancient Greeks, they thought a woman could positively alter the appearance of her unborn baby for the better by spending long hours staring at beautiful well-proportioned statues of whoever. Or, alternatively, warp their babies into ugly little monsters through accidental exposure to any troubling visual stimulus. Them thinking any pregnant woman who dared imagine the wrong thing at the wrong time risked giving birth to a snaggle-faced infant.
It was thought that the skin was uniquely vulnerable to emotional imprinting. The interface between an individual and society. Between a newborn and a mother’s nurturing touch.
In the mid-1700s, a pair of Scottish brothers proved that unborn fetuses and their mothers didn’t share the same blood supply, thus throwing the theory of maternal impressions into question. An exchange of blood being how people believed the destructive feelings flowed from mother to child.
But still, in France in the early 1800s, pregnant noblewomen would demand to be wheeled to the Louvre to spend their afternoons gazing intensely at portraits of handsome and powerful men, hoping to imprint those traits on their beaming bundles of joy.
Even now, there are still people who will tell you if an expecting mother doesn’t cater to her food cravings, her child will be born with a birthmark fashioned after the item of her desire. This is why people refer to birthmarks as looking like strawberries or coffee or chocolate.
This is why in Italian and Spanish, the word for birthmark translates to cravings.
4.
The boy plays catch with his father. The boy collects football cards. For no real reason, his favorite team is the 49ers, and his favorite player is Joe Montana. The boy joins sports teams with his brothers—tee-ball, then baseball, soccer, basketball. His father drives him to all his practices, even helps coach some of his teams. Sports are all right, the boy figures. But he never really gets any good. He runs laps but is easily winded. He gets kicked in the shins by slide-tackles during soccer and the ball is stolen—he never scores any goals. When he’s up to bat, stray pitches send baseballs hurtling hard into his back, taking his breath away—he limps to first base. He’s relegated to left field, where he stands under the sun, overheated and bored, until the team gets upset with him for failing to catch a fly ball. He’s too short to go anywhere in basketball. The boy does not impress his father. The boy quits sports.
The boy goes hunting. Heads up north to the deer lodge with his father and brothers and uncles and male cousins. His grandfather and his great uncles. It’s a multigenerational family institution—this waiting in the woods to kill wildlife with bows and guns. The boy gets up before dawn, slides into an oversized camouflage jumpsuit, and heads out with his father into the frozen Michigan countryside, careful where he steps, trying not to make a sound. Occasionally his father will stop him, point down at fresh tracks. They make their way to a blind or a stand, depending on whether it’s bow or rifle season.
At first the boy is too young to handle a bow or rifle. He just helps with small tasks—like attaching the compound bow to a rope so it can be hoisted up to the wood platform in the branches above. Then he climbs up the tree and sits quietly next to his father. He likes this part best—listening to the wind tremble the trees, bringing their leaves to life as branches occasionally crack. His eyes are on the bait pile, wanting to be the first to see something move. To witness his father make the kill. Mostly they only see does, no bucks save the occasional spike horn. Nothing with a rack big enough to be worth shooting. The boy wants to prove how good he is at sitting still, alert, all senses tuned to the task at hand. He wants to collect a good story, something to regale his uncles with back in the lodge at night, when they are all drunk and slurry and playing poker and swapping tales of the hunt.
The deer camp is among the few places the boy sees his father do so much laughing and smiling—mostly on account of all the beer consumed. Deer camp is a fun place; it’s different than the rest of the world, where things are always so serious.
Once the boy goes out with an uncle, and the uncle gets a kill. Average buck, no big deal. Eight point. They track it down, and the boy watches as his uncle flips the deer onto its back and slides a hunting knife into the skin around its anus, pulling up the skin, white belly fur covered with blood, slicing up all the way to the neck. The uncle explains how to remove the guts, all intact, leaving them steaming in a pile on the snow. The uncle cuts out the heart. Holds it aloft.
“See the heart? Cool, huh? You want to keep it?”
“Sure!” the boy says, curious. It’s velvety beet red.
They roll the carcass onto a sled for transport. The uncle tosses the heart into the empty chest cavity, and it lands in a puddle of blood with an audible sploosh. The boy keeps the heart in a Ziploc bag so he can take it to school and show off to the other kids.
He squeezes at it through the plastic, trying to figure out how it used to operate.
The boy gets a rifle for his sixteenth birthday. He’s old enough to hunt on his own, but it’s not as fun as when he used to go with his father. Still, there’s a rush that comes after trudging through the dark snow out to his blind, when he sits down and carefully loads golden bullets into the chamber of the rifle. The power to kill is now at his disposal. The sun rises. He sits and sits until his fingers and toes go numb. But the boy never sees anything worth shooting. The boy always returns to the deer lodge empty-handed. The boy does not impress his father. The boy quits hunting.
The father shows the boy all his own favorite things: bowling, golf, camping, fishing, building things out of wood. Playing horseshoes. Planting things and tending to them while they grow.
“Dad, don’t you ever do anything fun?” the boy asks.
“Sure I do,” the father says. “Hunting is fun. Yardwork is fun.”
Sometimes the boy walks into his room and finds his father there. Maybe he’s staring perplexed at the boy’s morbid acrylic paintings. Maybe he’s confiscating one of the boy’s books because it’s been deemed inappropriate. Maybe he’s reading a new piece of the boy’s writing, a short story—the stories have grown darker over the years, the characters dealing with unrequited love, suicide, violent murder, abduction. The father does not seem impressed with the boy’s creativity. The father is only concerned.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” the father says. “You can talk to me.”
But the boy does not feel like he can talk to his father. Whenever the boy gets into trouble, the father sits on the end of his bed, firmly reprimanding him. The boy remains silent while being lectured. He knows if he opens his mouth he’ll start to cry, and he doesn’t want his father to see him break down into sobs. He doesn’t want his father to be disappointed.
3.
According to science, being born with a cleft has absolutely nothing to do with your mother being cursed by a witch that has shape-shifted into a hare.
How a cleft actually forms is when something interrupts the bits of a fetus’s face from fusing together.
The exact cause of such craniofacial anomalies wasn’t readily known until fairly recently, when people abandoned folklore in favor of embryology, when surgeons began studying the way our primitive tissues fold over and over on themselves in the womb. Our shared metamorphic journey with other vertebrates. We all start out as cellular kaleidoscopes, bodies twisting into numerous genetic permutations before settling on whatever winds up in all those baby pictures our parents ultimately show off to their friends.
Problem is, for some of us, our faces get stuck somewhere in the middle of the process. Forever frozen halfway between animal and human being.
For all vertebrates, there are these things that appear during the fourth week of gestation called pharyngeal arches. Maybe you’ve seen them in those photos of embryonic stages from high school biology, the ridges looking a little like gills. They form in symmetrical pairs, and in humans, some of them eventually give rise to the structures of our face: throat, tonsils, mouth, jaws, nose. Lips.
In the early nineteenth century, German doctors got it right when they theorized that lips were formed from five separate processes, their development culminating when bits of these gill-like arches migrate toward each other and then gradually merge. Normally, this happens at four to seven weeks. If the merging of these embryonic structures is interrupted for any reason—environmental or genetic—a cleft remains. An empty gap where flesh should be. A space running right down the center of your face.
A cleft can take on a variety of shapes and sizes depending on what went wrong, the most common being a unilateral cleft—a cleft on one side of the upper lip—combined with a cleft of the hard and soft palates. But there are also bilateral clefts, with gaps splitting both sides of your lips. The lips alone might be affected and not the palate. Or the palate alone could be affected, fully or partially, the divide hidden unless you open your mouth. Some have called this “a cleft without a cleft.”
In terms of the triggers, the recurrence of clefts in a particular family indicates a genetic basis. Other times, environmental causes such as viral infections, vitamin deficiencies, or the presence of disruptive teratogens during the first trimester are to blame.
The truth is, more often than not, clefts occur with no clear culprit.
It’s hundreds of years past the Dark Ages, and all we can really do when someone is born with a cleft is shrug, throw on some scrubs, cleanse our hands of bacteria, grab a scalpel, and try our best to fix Mother Nature’s mistake.
Perhaps agonizing over the causes of a cleft serves no fruitful purpose anyhow. No matter the amount of surgical precision involved, nothing can ever really completely undo the disruptive damage caused during the key developmental stages of just about anything. Faces, personalities, relationships—they’ll all continue to grow and unfold, but the evidence of that original fracturing will never fully fade.
2.
The last plastic surgery, I’m in between tenth and eleventh grade. This is after years of checkups and reassurances from Dr. Newman that my lips were indeed developing according to plan. But now I’m in high school and even more sensitive about my looks. Positive I must appear monstrous to those who encounter me. My upper lip seems to me lopsided, a bug-bite-lump protruding off-kilter where there should be a smooth curve in the center. And the damned scars never seem to fade.
Every time I see myself in a picture, I look at my face and wince, repulsed. Knowing that no girl will ever want to make out with me. All the pretty ones I see in the hallways at school, busy flirting with the jocks who spit on me for sport…I fantasize about them with reckless abandon.
I don’t dare talk to them. Even the thought of making a move stirs my guts into roiling panic.
Maybe, after this next surgery, things will finally change.
Battered down by the insults constantly flung in my direction, I even begin to hate my lower lip, which I find too large, protruding too far from my face. During the final meeting with Dr. Newman before my last surgery, I ask him if the lump on my upper lip is going to go away this time, and he explains that it will grow and smooth out as I age. I ask if he can do anything about my lower lip, so it’s not as large, and he chuckles.
“Sure,” he says, “but I’d feel bad making your lower lip smaller when so many of my patients come in asking for lips just like that. You may find later in life that girls appreciate it.”
I suppose that had I been born without a birth defect, I’d still have voluptuous lips, and I should at least accept how it was I was supposed to have looked. So I let the issue go.
This time the surgery is much simpler—only lip slicing, no hospital stay. I’m older, so no teddy-bear-patterned hospital gown. No strawberry-scented gas mask. But afterward, waking up, the same tremendous disorienting nausea. The same swollen, stitched-up, Frankenstein parrot face. The same wasted summer at my mother’s, dreading every trip into public, unable to go swimming at the beach.
Shortly after the surgery, when my lip is at its most swollen, my mom takes my brothers and me to our alcoholic stepfather’s family reunion at his parents’ trailer in the middle of the Northern Michigan woods. The teenagers drink beer with the adults, tossing footballs, openly pointing at me. The younger children, entirely unsupervised, eat liquid cheese and liquid chocolate out of plastic cups with spoons, revealing their rotten teeth as they smile at me, pausing just to laugh at my malformed face. Empty beer cans and assorted filth accumulate on the lawn until there’s not much grass left showing through. As the sun sets, all these inebriated extended family members screaming at their spouses, screaming at their children, their children screaming at each other, my stepdad screaming at my mom. All of them, cruel and stupid and drunk as they are, still with their perfectly-shaped nondeformed mouths.
I lock myself in our car and cry and cry.
1.
If I mention to someone I’m bothered by looking in the mirror, they generally respond with confusion, reassuring me that I look normal to them. That they never even would have noticed the surgery history recorded in the off-kilter geography of my face had I not brought it up.
On the surface, I believe them. But there’s some compartmentalized part of me that remains forever the skeptic. A split-faced infant that still struggles to suck down its food.
I know my good fortune, having been repaired by some of the most talented plastic surgeons in the country. I know they meant for the best with their steady cuts, their unwavering latex-covered hands. But my cleft runs deeper than flesh. A psyche wound. Fissured mind.
The word cleft is most often used to describe a fissure in rock. As in a crack, as in a fracture, as in a breach. A crevice in what would otherwise be solid earth.
But a cleft isn’t active. It isn’t happening in the present, it’s evidence of a split that’s already occurred. It indicates a fracturing that came before. You dance around the crack, only guessing at the ancient geological violence that led to the divided landscape. You avoid staring too closely into its depths, so as not to be consumed.
Cleft is the past tense of cleave.
Cleave, as in to cut something apart with a razor-sharp implement, like the blade of a knife or a scalpel. To draw blood. To sever, especially along a natural divide. To separate. As in a child from his mother, a boy from his feelings.
Cleave, as in: to split. Splitting, as in: your father and I are splitting up.
Splitting, as in the term used in psychoanalysis for the failure to bring together all the aspects of yourself into a cohesive whole. Running away from the parts of yourself that you refuse to accept.
When you split off from yourself, it distorts reality. Grandiose feelings of self-importance can rapidly give way to self-loathing. In relationships, a partner can be idealized or demonized depending on whether or not one’s needs are gratified. Splitting leads to chaotic and unstable relationship patterns, identity diffusion. Mood swings.
How sharp of an implement does it take to split an ego along the masculine and the feminine? Is there any surgeon with skill enough to repair the divide inflicted by pink-and-blue thinking?
Cleave the corpus callosum. Opposing brain hemispheres. Reason against emotion.
Cleave, as in: to be cut off from. Ostracized by peers, made to feel like an other. Playing alone in your room because you don’t want anyone to ask you again and again: What happened to your lip? Cut off from your tears, because you’re a boy and boys aren’t supposed to cry. Cut off from playing dress-up with the clothes your mother left behind, because boys aren’t supposed to look pretty. Cut off from it even being a valid concern that your lip is swollen and crusted over and held back from bursting with stitches, because boys aren’t supposed to take an interest in their personal appearances.
Once a scalpel has cut something apart, there’s a fine art to stitching the pieces back together.
Only a scar remains to tell of what happened. Without my scar, my history would be erased—evidence vanished. It’s said that some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. Me, I wear my trauma on my face.
But here’s the thing: the verb cleave is the only English word with two synonyms that are antonyms of each other: separate and adhere.
Because cleave can also mean to unite or be united closely in interest or affection; to develop a strong emotional attachment.
To adhere closely; to stick; to hold fast; to cling.
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