Confessional Interview: Life with a Cleft Lip

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As I meet Lizzie Cooper outside Winchester train station in the April sunshine, she strikes me as happy, articulate and beams at me as she describes her soon-to-be-husband. But had you known her at the tender age of 15, by her own admissions she would have been nearly unrecognisable. She was bitter, angry and withdrawn - a description that could match just about every other teenager in the history of the world. But she perhaps had a better reason than most for feeling so down.

Lizzie as a newborn

Lizzie was born with a cleft lip and palette, a condition where parts of the mouth do not form properly in the womb. The result is a facial disfigurement which can, after several rounds of surgery, be rendered completely unnoticeable. She spent her formative years in and out of surgery and in the waiting rooms of various consultants. She has had eight operations in total – the first when she was four months old, the last when she was 22. She hates hospitals but, as a child, accepted that these are the cards she had been dealt. The bullying and rude comments from strangers, however, were a little bit harder to handle.

She tells me about her first day at school. “I came home and I sat my mum down and I said, “Mummy, what’s wrong with my face? Kids keep asking me what’s wrong with my face.’”

She says that her mum told her that she should go back and tell the other children that she would be able to get a “designer” nose when she grew up, whereas they would be stuck with whatever they had. It didn’t do anything to stop the bullying, she says, but it gave her a mechanism to cope with it; it gave her some hope in the form of thinking that whatever made her stick out could one day be ‘fixed’.

Four year-old Lizzie

It wasn’t just other children she had to be wary of, but adults too. “I remember them pointing out my face to kids, ‘Look darling, look at that girl, look at the way she looks.’ Society as a whole can be quite judgemental if you look different. Looking back as an adult that made me really quite angry, but as a kid it just made me want to cry. I hate it when adults can be judgemental because adults should know better.”

She hesitates for a bit, and then says that if she has kids, she would never raise them in such a way. “I’ve been there and I’ve done that and it’s not a nice thing to be judged on how you look. It’s shallow and it’s stupid.”

I ask her about family, and she says that they were very supportive and up front about the kind of challenges that she would have to face in her life. She feels lucky. “They never made me feel like it was something wrong with me.”

She tells me a story of a man she knows from CLAPA, the Cleft Lip and Palette Association, of which she is an active member. She says that this man was not as lucky as her, and that his father never accepted him. The dad apparently had turned round to his mother when has was born and told the mother that their son must have gotten it from her side of the family. Lizzie tells me that he had been an extremely bitter man for most of his life, and that this was the root of it.

Bitterness seems to be a recurring theme. In a previous phone conversation, Lizzie told me that she was absolutely fine about having a cleft but that some people had “real chips on their shoulders” about it. I ask her what she meant by that. “I think some people ask why they were even born like this and why couldn’t their parents have taken the opportunity and just have gotten rid of them before they came in to this world.”

She says it’s definitely a case of “why me”, especially in the situation that occurs when a person with a cleft has reached self-acceptance, but is still being bullied for looking different. Lizzie’s breaking point was the second year of university. She was sick of feeling the way she did and sought some counselling. The first session made her feel much better – she cried, she shouted, but she felt lighter.

Lizzie and husband Chris

This was the point when her life began to turn around. Working through some of her deep-seated issues about her foul treatment at the hands of other people had done her some good, but meeting her fiancé helped, too. “It was quite alien to me that someone could find me attractive because I didn’t view myself that way. He definitely helped open my eyes in seeing that I’m not the monster I sometimes see in the mirror, that there are qualities in me that are worth something.”

She describes the state that she finds her life in now as a “nice shock.” She tells me that as a 15 year old, she had already resigned herself to a lonely and bleak existence. She believed that she might never go to university, get a job or get married. But she says that despite the heartache, she would not change anything about her life. It has shaped who she is and she is happy with who she has become. “I’m content. I’m quite happy with life in general, you know, it could always be better. But at the end of the day, I feel quite proud of being a ‘clefty ‘, as we know ourselves, and I’m absolutely fine with it. I’m in a job that pays, I’ve got a little flat with my other half and I'm about to get married, so life is good.”