Being A Cleftie — A Rollercoaster Of Trauma, Resilience, And Success

Far more people are born with cleft lip and palate than we think, but far too few talk about it…

You look the way you do, because you were kissed by the angels before you were born, said a friend of mine many years ago. She claimed it was an old Romanian saying. Two decades later, I still haven’t heard anyone else say it nor could I find any evidence that being kissed by an angel is associated with cleft lip and palate, so I’ll assume she was just being nice. One thing is evident though, I remembered it, even if we weren’t friends for long, nor did we ever meet in real life. The words, however, stayed with me, and so did many other things that I never really opened up about before. Until now…

It’s time to talk about being a cleftie, because if nobody understands us, it’s probably because we never spoke loud enough.

The diametral opposite of “being kissed by an angel” that I’ve gotten as a reaction to my looks was “you have a face fit for breaking jars”. That’s a very crude but infinitely better translation than Google’s, from the Romanian “față de spart borcane”. You’d think this was childhood bullying, but you’d be wrong. Both…