By DAWN WEBER
“A lovely baby girl you have there. It’s too bad about that awful birthmark.”
Those are the first and last words I ever hear from your original pediatrician. After she leaves the delivery room, I tell the nurse to keep her away from us, and I cry myself to sleep.
My daughter. Seven pounds, 13 ounces, blonde hair, 21 inches long. To me, you’re perfect.
The day after your birth, I hire a different baby doctor, and unlike her predecessor, she possesses decorum, common sense and bedside manners. She also has plenty of experience. But she doesn’t have an answer for the mark she calls a “strawberry hemangioma.”
“Sometimes, they fade over the years,” she tells me, “and sometimes they don’t.”
We bring you home from the hospital the next day, and amid the bliss, chaos, sleeplessness, confusion and joy that come with a first child, I am steeped in grief. In a world that demands female beauty, I envision your life with a marked, imperfect face.
I pretend to ignore the stares at the grocery store. I grow numb to the questions from little kids.
“What happened to her?”
“What’s wrong with her face?”
“What’s that on her head?”
I realize that we’re lucky. Other parents have babies with far more serious problems than a red mark on the skin.
It doesn’t help — I know how kids are. And every time I get an innocent, ignorant question from a child, I hear your future on the playground.
“What happened to you?”
“What’s wrong with your face?”
“Ugh. What’s that on your head?”
Secretly, I blame myself for this. I figure it’s payback for the single 12-ounce can of Diet Coke I drank each day of my pregnancy. Or a punishment from God for some old, forgotten sin.
But those are my transgressions, not yours, and I cannot accept that in 1997, with all the advances in modern medical science, there’s absolutely nothing that can be done for strawberry hemangiomas.
Top Comments
Disgusting, how could you do that to a baby. To make her think she was anything less then beautiful
My girl was born in February and 2 weeks after she was born her strawberry birthmark appeared on her lip. It was angry and red like a blister. We were told it was just a sucking blister. At 6 weeks our gp sent us to a dermatologist and he said as it had already started to grow in size it could grow to be the size of an egg. We also went through the same feelings of I love my perfect girl, but society will always bring it up. She's now had 2 laser sessions and had some prescription solutiony stuff put on it and the blood supply has been cut off. For the moment. I still get questions about what happened to her lip but for her sake I hope she grows into it like the doctor says she will.
Why does it matter that she has a mark on her face?
In a perfect world it wouldn't matter would it? But considering the one we live in, perhaps you should read some of the comments below to get some perspective.