Robert Hoge's personal story 'Ugly' at Happiness & Its Causes 2014

They are my words. The name of my memoir is Ugly. I knew I'd have to write it a lot, so I picked a short word.

So what's your relationship to beauty if you have named ugly at the center of so much?

Is it more to you than the skin you're in or the skin that people are in? Compost can be potentially... wow, compost might be beautiful to a gardener, but well... no, absolutely it can be, but I don't... I think there's something on the outside that can be beautiful and something on the inside that can be beautiful. You know, I imagine there are a number of people here who consider themselves short. I'm sure you don't think you're tall on the inside... maybe you do, and that's quite wonderful. But you know, what we need to do is we need to disassociate the characteristics of being generous and warm and intelligent and engaging from the concept of beauty or ugliness. Interesting. And if we do that, it's also okay to say someone's beautiful and to say someone's ugly.

Well, when I was born, I didn't look quite as wonderful as I do now. I had a massive tumor in the middle of my face which pushed my eyes to the side of my head, so my eyes were here where these dents were or are in the side of my head. I had two deformed legs. And you know, in the early '70s when I was born, there were no scans, there was no warning that I was coming. And my mother had a sense that something was wrong. It was quite a long labor, and she asked as soon as I was born... she didn't ask 'Is it a boy or a girl?' She said 'Is my baby okay?' And the doctor said 'No, he's not okay. He's got a big tumor in his face and something wrong with his legs.' And my mom basically sent me away without seeing me. So, more than that though, she also described this baby that she hadn't seen in those days and weeks after ward as an 'it.' Yes. She had real trouble relating to me as her son. She went off back to the maternity ward, I went to the nursery. My dad saw me the day I was born, but she refused to see me for a week. She just couldn't engage with the sense that she had a child with so many problems. And then eventually, a doctor there convinced her to come and see me, and she did. And she looked down at me in my cot and decided then and there that she didn't want to take me home. And she then spent a few weeks talking to everyone: the local MP, her local doctor, her priest, to try and find as much support as she could for the notion of not bringing me home.

They did. I think mom was really worried about what the impact of bringing me home would have on her four normal children and the impact I'd have on their upbringing. And she got to a point where she thought, if she was so worried about the impact I'd have on them, that she should give them a say in whether I came home. So on Exhibition Wednesday in Brisbane, 40 almost 42 years ago, she brought my siblings up, and they all got to nurse me for about five minutes each. And then that Saturday at home, they all sat down around the kitchen table, and mom and dad asked them one by one: 'Should we bring Robert home?' And thankfully, one by one, they all said yes.

Yeah. Who's to say what would have happened if they'd said no? But I think my parents, and my mom was really genuine in that sense of wanting to know what they thought. And I think if they had said no, there'd be a really good chance that I didn't come home. And the great thing is that your parents and your mom became your staunch defenders. They had different approaches, we might get to that. But I wonder, your mother wrote a very detailed diary, and you have used that to piece together this memoir. Does reading that, even if we let go of what we know of what our parents might have felt about us as children, whether we were unwanted or whether we were a mistake, even if we let that go in adulthood, that that can still eat away at our psyche? It can still be a burden to us. Has your mother's rejection of you in those first weeks and months, really weeks, been a burden?

Some of the names you were called as a kid, and even though it sounds like you made friends pretty easily, you were part of a big family, there was a lot going on, there was a lot of warmth in your life. You know, kids can be absolute cretins. And you write really viscerally, I think, about the names you got called: Transformer, that was kind of a compliment. I yeah. Transformer naming the legs. But words like Flatnose or Toe-nose did eat away, didn't they?

Well, I think it probably in some ways helped me develop a sense of self faster, because everyone's different. I think it takes some people a lot longer to realize how they can define themselves as being different from others and what their internal value as a person is. But for me, there were obvious differences: other kids had legs, other kids had a normal nose and normal eyes, and I didn't. So that, I think, put me on that fast track to defining myself, or defining my sense of self, a lot faster. And it's really hard to piece together all of the things that helped do that. Writers like to talk about characters having a sense of agency and making decisions that are active choices that either go right or wrong, but they're actively making those choices. And most of us on a daily basis are making those sorts of choices, and I have made a lot of those sorts of choices across my life. But the other thing that became really important for me really quickly was understanding that our lives are also like a game of snakes and ladders. You roll a six and you end up on that square, and you go down a snake and you're 15 squares back, and you can't control that. And you need to reach a point of not just saying that stuff doesn't matter, but saying that if you want to live a full life, you need to accept that there's things you can't control. 100% of it. Big stuff for a kid to grapple with. And I figured all that out when I was eight.

Well, when I was in grade nine, the doctor said to my parents, 'We want to do another operation on Robert.' They were very keen to do some more work on me before I hit puberty. And I think doctors are like artists as well; they don't want to leave a work half unfinished. And I think they looked at my face, which was massively improved, and I could see properly and interact with the world much better, but they thought ten years later there was a lot more they could do. So they said to my parents, 'We want to do another operation on Robert. We'll fill in the gaps in the side of his head, we'll fix up some scars, we'll rework his nose. And when we rework his nose to make it look a bit more normal, that'll emphasize that his eyes are still a little bit too far apart, so we'll put them a bit closer together.' My parents then did the single worst thing they have ever done to me in my life and said, 'Well, Robert, you're almost an adult; it's your choice.' And I don't know, but I'm pretty sure grade nine boys are the worst form of humanity anywhere, ever possible. There is nothing worse. And I wasn't a particularly upstanding example of grade nine boys either. So that was a lot for someone to think about. So you did think about it. We went around all of the options and talked about what it would involve and what I'd look like at the end and how long the procedure would take. And then we got round to talking about the risks. They said, 'There's work on your face, there's a lot of blood, you could end up with an infection. The procedure could go wrong; it could undo some of the work they did when you were four and a half. And because we're moving the orbit of your eyes, there's a one in four chance you'll go blind.' So when we were having the discussion and it was decision time, we were sitting down again at the kitchen table, my parents, me, and my elder brother Michael who's almost ten years older than me. And we talked through the risks, and we came to the bit about going blind, and he said, 'Well, what use is it looking pretty if he can't see himself?' And I think I'd probably have reached the same decision anyway, but that just really focused my mind on why I would want to have the operation and why I wouldn't. And I just decided then and there, and I said to my parents, 'No, I don't want to do it. And I don't want any more operations.' Are you at peace with that decision now, as a 40, nearly 42-year-old?

Well, it meant several months of being scared shitless of being a dad. It gave me a really good sense, and I think it helped me reach some peace with a notion of beauty. She's a very beautiful child, a very beautiful baby. And people kept asking me, 'Do you want a boy or a girl?' And I'm going, 'Literally, I just want a baby with ten fingers and ten toes.' I was a bit worried about what I would think if I had a child with a disability or a deformity, and I went through that whole circle of the Toe-nose name-calling again, because I kept thinking, 'If I have a child, I don't want to have a child who has major issues.' And part of that was I knew what it was like to go through that, but part of it was also that in some way I'd feel responsible. And then I'd get to a point thinking, 'Well, if there's anyone who can do a decent job of raising a child with a disability or a deformity, it should be me.' And I kind of made my peace with that. So she's grown into an almost 12-year-old girl who's taller than me when I've got my artificial legs off. And make sure I know that, no, she'd be reminding you of that all the time. 12-year-olds. How is your relationship then, given that this is the Happiness and Its Causes conference, how is your relationship to what's important to you and happiness... maybe their separate themes... changed over the years? Maybe it's a question about priorities, I don't know.

Well, I keep thinking that I used the way I look as an excuse to sort of avoid trying to interact with girls a lot during my teens. And I think I just avoided making a lot of the mistakes that everyone makes that I needed to make when I was a lot younger. So I think some of that happened a bit later than it should have. But I still find it hard when my wife tells me she thinks I'm beautiful. That sounds dishonest, but it just sounds strange to me. But I understand that it's real for her, and that's the important thing. Thank you, Robert, very much. It's wonderful.