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.