A handful of times now, while on public transit with my infant son, I?ve had a conversation that begins the same way. Someone will look at his face and notice the little red seam that curves up from the centre of his lip into his left nostril, curling his mouth into a permanent pout. Whether through personal or anecdotal experience, they?ll identify this as a cleft lip, one of the most common birth defects, and say ?What a cutie! When did he get the surgery"?
I?ve never really known how to answer this question, partly because I?ve never been totally comfortable with the assumed intimacy that many people think shared experiences afford them and partly because my son doesn?t have a cleft lip exactly and has never had surgery. When it comes to the future of this particular aspect of his life, I don?t know if he ever will. It has taken me a while to be OK with not knowing. The first thing I saw when my son was born was his mouth and the way it gaped in a tiny, soundless howl of shock and surprise. I didn?t notice the red seam then nor when the midwife handed him to me, wet and screaming, nor when I learned to hold him while my husband cut the cord between us and took pictures. The physical work of birth does to time what it does to the body, expanding and contracting it in mind-bending ways, so I may be remembering the order all wrong. But this next part comes back very clearly: While a nurse weighed my son and took measurements, the attending midwife leaned into my ear an...