As a child, my mother had a blue diary. In soft, marbled cover and frayed corners. You could see from them how often they picked him up, wrote on his pages and re-read them. He was always there for her. It's nice, of course, to admit that I was the main topic of her diary. But this is not entirely true. Her Diary was also about herself in many ways. About why she didn't want to take me home when I was born.
And she didn't want to take it because of a tumor on her face and crooked legs, which nature awarded me. Then, in 1972, a child was born with eyes recessed into the head and a huge nose.
Mom was expecting a healthy baby. And I was born. It seems to me that she guessed something, because when the birth was over, the first thing that my mother asked the doctor was not the gender of the newborn, but whether everything was all right with him. “No,” the doctor replied. "He has a bump on his face and crippled legs." Then they never showed me, they took me to the intensive care unit. Then, when my dad looked at me and described to my mother, they cried together.
“He's probably going to die,” Mom said.
“No, he's too strong and healthy. Therefore, no options,”said the father.
Mom refused to look at me for a week. Then she gathered her courage and came with a nurse to my box. When she looked into the playpen where I was lying, she said that she would not take me home.
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She later wrote in her blue diary: “I wanted him to die. I said at the hospital that I did not need my child and that I would not take him away under any circumstances. I didn't feel anything for this child."
Subsequently, my mother began to visit me regularly, but there was no question of taking me home. Once after such a visit, in a moment of despair, she honestly confessed to her sister: "He is so ugly!"
She eventually came to terms with my appearance and managed to separate the shock from the need to raise a child who was not very lucky in health. The grains came off the husk, and she managed to sort out her feelings. One fine morning, my parents gathered four of my brothers and sisters and at the family council asked the question: "Take the baby home or not?" And so all the children, one by one, nodded in agreement. The Rubicon was crossed.
By the time I turned 10, I partly understood how my mother felt when she saw me at the hospital. From time to time I asked her to read something from the "book about how you didn't want to take me home." My parents talked to me honestly and frankly about my appearance and their feelings at the time of my birth. That conversation became a key one in the question of my becoming in the world.
But I did not finally understand them until my first daughter was born, when I was 30. Then I really realized what my mother had to go through. My wife was pregnant, and I was terribly afraid that my appearance would be inherited by her. Inside me lived such an explosive mixture of intense expectation, despair, fear and love for her, not yet born, which is difficult to convey! The only person I could talk to about all this was my mother. But she had already died for 5 years by that time.
But the memory of her helped me find the strength to accept inside the fact that she could be born “like that”. And since she accepted me, then I can also accept my daughter. The lesson I learned was that our children are not always born perfect. Over the years, even the best natural data wears out. They are born as they are - beautiful, different, complex, and sometimes "spoiled". Perfection comes after. It comes when we accept their beauty and "ugliness", positive and negative qualities and try to preserve every achievement for our personal history, every day and write about all this in blue diaries.