May
2006
Beauty, unfinished
Yesterday I had a gipsy lady coming for testing with her daughter, who just turned sixteen. I went from the nurses’room to my cabinet without seeing the girl, then asked the mom to bring her in.
When I saw her, I literally remained breathless. She was beauty incarnate. The purest, most angelic face structure I’ve ever seen, golden complexion only slightly kissed with a few freckles by the sun, a nose drawn by the patron saint of plastic surgeons, a soft, sweet voice that could make Boy George switch teams, all this completed with a dark wave of hair and an elfin body. If I’d be even a little bi-curious I would be composing love poetry for her right now.
She sits on the chair in front of my desk, quiet, hands in her lap, her mom doing the talking. The mom’s pregnant (6th child, she says) and looks like a more mature version of her girl. We chat a bit and then she leaves me with her daughter.
The angel is seriously broken. She has spina bifida and a moderate mental retardation, sayeth the papers. She also had undergone three major surgeries, two on her spine and one on the cranium. She shows me the scar on the skull, carefully masked with a hairpin. She tells me what it feels like to get an infection after cranial surgery and develop meningitis, then stay three months on a hospital bed, not sure if you will be able to walk or talk again, or even survive. “I saw death a few times, you get used to it after a while”. She shows me the hospital discharge papers for her surgeries . “This one’s for the first cancer tumor removal”. “And this one is for the second”.
We joke, I make her laugh and be more talkative while trying not to stare at her face too much although she seems oblivious to her glow. She tells me about her girlfriends, the little sister who gets straight 10s and wants to be a doctor, the brother that can’t get past 4th grade even though he’s 15 years old, the alcoholic dad that beats mom and takes the money mom earns to go drinking. I discover that she’s illiterate. “The brain surgeon said I cannot sit in a schol chair for four hours”. I give her the IQ tests - yup, moderate retardation. “I wish I would be alowed to wear high heels. Or maybe run a little. I dream a lot of running, just running.” She shows me the drainage tube left permanently in her body - a thin line under the skin of her neck, going from her skull to the abdominal cavity.
I write her papers, ask mom to come inside, give mom a few advices on how to deal better with the girl when she’s angry or frustrated, ask about the overachieving little daughter and the abusive husband. “He doesn’t beat me while I’m pregnant .. It’s not that bad, really.” I tell her we have a shelter, if she ever feels enough is enough. “They won’t let me go there with five kids and one more on the way”.
Mom and daughter leave, both of them smiling, mom helping daughter to walk. I watch them on the window until they dissapear .
This is an amazing post! I feel for the girl of your post and her mother. Enjoyed your writting…keep it up. I will be back.
Thanks
[…] This weekend, I fixed it. They shook my hand vigorously and thanked me several times. In a world where they are normally discarded as worthless by the people living around them, today they felt… human. Do not misinterpret any of this. There’s no redemption here. No heroism. I failed myself last week, but I managed to correct it. I suppose I could have talked to a psychologist about this incident. Instead, you get to read this as a sort of virtual confession. As it would be out of character for me to do something like this again, you shouldn’t expect more of the same. Just part of the cleansing process and I hope you, anonymous and unspecific you, understand. […]
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My eyes got misty while reading this .. there’s a lot of suffering in the world and we are not aware of the most of it.
Loved the story .. please tell some more.
Autor, Respect!