I first started wearing glasses when I was 8 years old. My mother says she finally realized I needed glasses when I told her our horses had escaped, but when the family went outside to check, everyone but me could clearly see that the horses were inside not outside of the fence. I was promptly marched off to the optometrist, and I came home wearing these humdingers.
By the time I was 10 years old, I had downsized ever-so-slightly to this pair, in a lovely shade of frosty blue plastic.
(This is me with a cow I won in a 4-H essay contest in which I had to explain why I deserved to win a cow. Her name was Bonnie. She was a Jersey.)
In middle school, I switched over to some John Lennon granny glasses, but by 9th grade, I'd talked my parents into contact lenses, which I wore all through high school and college. I never cleaned them properly and sometimes carelessly left them in for 24 hours straight, in direct contradiction to the doctor's safety warnings when he handed them over to me. It's a wonder I didn't contract some terrible eyeball fungus during that period.
At age 23, while pregnant with my first baby, I finally gave up on contacts altogether because I was too poor to replace one of the lenses when I lost it. It was back to glasses for me, and I've been wearing them ever since. Since then, I've never had the desire to ditch my trusty facial appendages. To me, my glasses are as much a part of who I am as my left arm. Not only am I like a helplessly blind baby shrew when I am without them, I also feel naked.
Every three or four years I go in to replace my glasses, about the time I realize that I can no longer see as well. Each time I get a new pair, the optometrist shakes his head in wonderment as he examines my eyes, saying he rarely sees otherwise healthy people whose eyes continue to deteriorate at this rate by my age. Last week, when I got my most recent new pair, the optometrist put it more succinctly: "You're getting as blind as Mr. Magoo," is what he said.
Also at this last appointment, he asked me whether I'd noticed any difference in my ability to read small print. "It might be time for bifocals," he said.
Oh no, I said confidently. I'm nearsighted only. I see up close just fine.
Secretly, however, I knew that I had been having a bit more trouble reading things. But bifocals already? Hell no. What am I? One of the Golden Girls? Harumph.
But I've been wearing my new, much stronger prescription for a week or so now, and I can no longer deny the painful, painful truth. I cannot read fine print any more. And this new prescription only made it worse. Now, when I have to read the instructions on a bottle of medicine, for example, I have to lift my glasses up so I can see the item directly, and then I squint through one eye. THEN I can see the words. This is not good.
I guess I need bifocals. And I will be going back to the optometrist today to have my prescription adjusted.
It's funny, the things that make you feel "old." For me, this is definitely one of them. As bad as my eyes are, I've always consoled myself with the thought that I can read just fine. I think of bifocals as an undeniable, visual signal to the world that I am Not Young. And it's moments like these that make me think about what it will be like for C, born at the end of my 39th year, to have a 58 year old mama when she graduates high school. I'll only be 42 when her eldest sibling graduates. That seems about right to me. But 58? With bifocals? Will I also have a walker and orthopedic shoes by then? Will she be embarrassed? Will I be embarrassed?
Or will I just be mama? The only one she has. I know that sometimes it's been odd in years past for my oldest children to have the youngest mom in the group. Maybe your mother embarasses you no matter what her circumstances. Even old lady glasses.
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