The Momma Clan

Dear women of today 

This is for you

From a Cleftlip kid Woman- Sunayana Kayastha (Jasmine of December)

There lives a girl with a cleft lip named Jasmine. She was told to undergo surgeries, but after her ten major surgeries, she feels exhausted by the beauty ideals. She gave up.

Since childhood, she has been told to look pretty, her curly hair is devilish, and to resemble someone with lighter skin. But she never minds; she knows she is a Disney princess wearing her own tiara of confidence. She smiles cutely in front of the mirror, feeling like she pockets her own little world. She has her microphone in hand, singing and dancing, filling her inner world with an audience doing “Roar.” She is me. She is someone who has a cleft lip, is bold, yet has her Disney cartoons nearby.

Dear woman of today,

Don’t break her by saying her voice is unclear, she cannot sing, and she should only write. Your criticism can thwart the growth of many kids who want to be confident, strong cleft-lip kids. He or she may want to honor their cleft lip as a badge of honor; don’t reduce their heart to rubble. Don’t shrink their field of sunflowers.

There lives a cleft lip girl who has faced torment in relationships. Just because her whole family has a cleft lip hereditary background doesn’t mean that she has to bear the brunt of hereditary malice. She may not have even been born in this world, but the divine allowed her to see it .

But what do you do as a society? You bully her; you tell her she is good for nothing, you say she cannot please men, or that she is pleasing men in some paradigms. You hurt her existence. You want her to marry despite the fact that she has suffered mental and physical pain. Why is marriage and pleasing so important? Why is an unhealed woman told to prepare for marriage without knowing any consequences? Who is the one to take the blame now?

You say she is ugly; she is verbally whipped ; she is said to be like a marriage material, a burden, a couch of decayed bones good for nothing . Did you know how far you trek the lane of verbal abuse to someone, making an abandonment-issue woman who wants to detach from every being as a trauma response? She bears all saltiness, yet she is made to carry the load of generational healing. Why is that so?

To today’s woman, before seeing a cleft-lipped child, envision her Dark Cinderella story before mocking her existence, see her-how bravely she chews water and drinks rocks. Consider how far she has come, how her character was developed. What are her experiential roots? How much had she been abused, and how did she clip the wings of freedom? Ask her about the briefcases of sacrifices she has made in the name of someone’s son and daughter.

If you believe humanity exists , honor the signature of their presence . It’s not easy to come into this world, battling hand in hand while the world shooed these voices as unclear; they wanted to be heard. Please feel the depth of the ocean by tasting the salt beneath; just charting the constellation doesn’t mean that you have understood the vastness of the sky.

Be lukewarm for them; there are cage after cage for a cleft lip kid. Their half-lives are already painful due to the questions of why they survived. What is the reason? If my family didn’t accept me, how could my friends or my future husband or his family are going to accept me? I haven’t written the lines about parental death throughout years and years they carry the guilt of not doing the best. Still those kids are considered unlucky black cats for the whole society.

The insecurities, the bullies, the criticisms, and the feeling of making someone an alien suppress the hearts of many cleft lip kids. They build wall after walls and pretend everything is fine. This should end everyone. This needs a huge homework for everyone. A glow stick can bring a change for the flicker of the moment, but those bunches of stars gives darkness, a light.

As a whole, I am just writing a sip here; the whole sea is within me. And right for you there is a giant ocean. It depends upon how we are capable to understand the oysters of wisdom of an ocean. Will you churn or throw pebbles into it. It’s up to you.

 I can just wish all of you to be that compassionate one  so, that it won’t be a bumpy ride for these kids. No body wants to be in any slump either.

Respect them, understand them; treasure them and love them, they really are hungry for being understood.

sunayana kayastha