The whole thing

Everytime I’ve looked at you for the past 8 months I see you not as you are, but as how you would be without KFS.  I’ve heard that as sort of a cliche, that parents of a child with physical differences still see their child as whole. What I didn’t realize is that it means you are constantly re-envisioning how your child *would* look.  I see you clearly, Miss M, with all of your scars, asymmetries, and areas of stunted growth.  But when I look at your mouth, I take a second to imagine what it would have looked like had your growth in the womb continued normally.  And when I look at your nose, I try to picture whether your nose would look like your brother’s nose, and how that would look on your face.  And when I look at your ears, I imagine whether they should look like your right ear or your left ear, because your ears look like they belong to two different people.  Even though I am constantly reimagining you, it’s because I do see you as whole.  You should have been whole, something skipped a step along the way, and made you look different.  But I still see you as coming from something whole and complete.  The physical stuff is just what happened to you after you were already created whole.  Kind of like the scars most people have from falling off a bike, or cutting themselves on something, or having something removed.  You were whole, and an accident happened.  I guess this is such a change in viewpoint for me because I never saw *myself* as whole when I was growing up.  The little scar on my lip from my own cleft made me feel like I was never whole, I was never completed.  I don’t want you to ever feel like you aren’t whole, like something was missing.  It’s a fine point, but one that I feel is important.  You were complete, and then you were scarred, just like everyone else in this world.