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Imagine you’re in art class. The teacher drops a lump of wet, sticky clay on the bench in front of you.
“You’ve got thirty minutes to sculpt a newborn baby’s face,” she says.
Everyone in the class waits, wondering if there are more instructions to come.
“Go!”
You grab the lump of clay and try to figure out where to start. First, better get the size right. You start tearing big chunks of clay off until the size looks okay and then you tackle the overall shape. There’s a big bulge on one side that you need to press hard with the palm of your hand to fix. When that looks about right, you shape the face itself and smooth the forehead. Next you craft a chin and push the clay with your thumb to add a little dimple. As you start to sculpt details—soft cheeks, a lovely small nose, perfect ears, eyes that are closed because you decide this newborn baby is asleep—you realize your sculpture is coming together just right.
“Time’s almost up,” your teacher says.
Your hands are racing across the clay. You’ve got just enough time to finish a few special touches, like eyebrows and a wisp of hair on top of the baby’s head.
There’s grit under your fingernails and your hands are sticky from the clay, but it doesn’t matter. You look down and see a beautiful day-old baby in front of you. This is going to be an A+ assignment.
Then, out of the corner of your eye, you see someone running toward you. It’s that one kid in class who really hates you. Yep, that one. Turns out he’s so jealous of how good a job you’ve done that he rushes toward your sculpture. You reach out to stop him, but it’s too late. He shoves a ball of clay right in the middle of the face you’ve made. You hear a soft squelch and then gasp as you see the damage the attack has done.
Your sculpture looks ruined. The little nose you made has been squashed by a giant clay splotch spread across the face. It has been pushed so hard into the face that the beautiful eyes you made are now way farther apart than they should be. The extra time you’d put into getting the size and shape of the head just right is totally wasted too. It’s bumpy and broken.
Imagine what that sculpture looks like now, and you’ll know what I looked like when I was born.
I’m the ugliest person you’ve never met.
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. No one had any idea what was coming. My parents had four children before me, and I should have been born, plain and simple. On a Friday. But July 21, 1972, came—and almost went—without much to show for it.
As midnight neared, however, my mother, Mary Hoge, went into labor. My parents didn’t own a telephone, so Mom rushed next door and asked the neighbors to call my father, Vince, home from work. Dad raced back from his job at a factory that made food for chickens. They had no time to spare. It would take them about half an hour to reach the hospital from our suburban Brisbane home.
My father arrived, jumped out of the car into the dark night, and ran upstairs. He packed my mother into the car as fast as he could, and they left for the hospital.
When Mom was admitted, her contractions that signaled the baby was coming were two minutes apart. Her baby should be there very soon. But at 2 a.m. on Saturday morning the contractions stopped dead. The doctors were worried and told my parents they might have to induce labor if the contractions didn’t restart. Mom was sent to the hospital ward to wait. At 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, July 23, her contractions resumed. It was a long, difficult labor for a fifth baby, and I was born at 12:35 p.m.
Back then, a mother’s usual first question would have been: “Is it a boy or a girl?” But something didn’t seem quite right, so my mother had a different question for the doctors.
“Is my baby okay?” she asked.
“No, Mrs. Hoge,” the doctor said, looking up in shock. “He is not okay. He has a lump on his head, and something wrong with his legs.”
The lump was a massive bulge that jutted out from the top of my forehead and ran all the way down to the tip of where my nose should have been. It was almost twice the size of my newborn fist. It had formed early during my development and made a mess of my face, pushing my eyes to either side of my head. Like a fish.
That wasn’t all. Looking down at me, the doctors saw that both my legs were mangled. The right leg was only three-quarters as long as it should have been and had a small foot bent forward at a very strange angle. The foot had four toes, and two of them were partially joined together. My left leg was even shorter and only had two toes. Both looked bent and broken.
I didn’t get a hug from Mom before she sent me away, but I did get a name before she’d even laid eyes on me: Robert Vincent Hoge.
Dad had already visited me on his own by the time he saw Mom. When he described how I looked, they both burst into tears.
“Perhaps he’ll die,” Mary said to her husband.
Growing up on his parents’ farm, Vince had birthed plenty of calves and lambs. He knew I might be an ugly baby, a baby with a tremendous number of problems, but he also knew his son was a fighter.
“No chance—he’s too strong and healthy,” he said.
That didn’t stop my mother feeling awful about it all, though. The next day was her birthday, and she’d expected a perfect baby as the best present ever. Instead, she got a little monster. I was sent to the hospital’s intensive-care ward—ugly and alone.