A story

This is from a book called The Whisper Test, and I just loved it. It is written by a woman named Marianne Burk. “I grew up knowing I was different,” she writes, and “I hated it. I was born with a cleft palate. When I started school my classmates made it clear to me how I looked; A little girl with misshapen lips, crooked nose, lopsided teeth and garbled speech.” That’s how she learned to think of herself. When schoolmates asked,” What happened to your lip?” she would tell them that she had fallen and cut it on a piece of glass. She felt somehow it was more acceptable to have suffered an accident, than to have been born different. “I was convinced that no one outside my family could love me. There was however, a teacher in the 2nd grade who we all adored, Mrs. Leonard. She was a short, round, happy, sparkling lady. Annually we had a hearing test. Mrs. Leonard gave the test to everyone in the class and finally it was my turn. I knew from past years that as we stood against the door and covered one ear the teacher sitting at her desk would whisper and we would have to repeat it back. Things like the sky is blue, or you have new shoes. I waited there for those words that God must have put into her mouth: those seven words that changed my life.” Mrs. Leonard said in her whisper, “I wish you were my little girl.” And the little girl who thought of herself as a reject and was raised as a barbarian in someone else’s eyes, felt the power of love for the first time. She had found out that somebody wanted her and it changed her life.