The Eyes Have It

I have uniquely bad vision. I am not one of the people who can walk into a well stocked optician's office and walk out with a pair of contact lenses. Mine are always special order. I don't have much in the way of natural eyesight.

I've been through a host of eye doctors due to changes in geography. I am always amused by their reactions as they get the first inkling of just how bad things are. My favorite is the one who told me that it's a good thing I wasn't around in prehistoric days, because I would've been eaten by a dinosaur. I call him Dr. Darwin. Then there was today's appointment, when the doctor chuckled that I "have a little bit of nearsightedness." I call him Dr. Hilarious.

It was at this appointment with Dr. Hilarious that I realized another troubling element to my eye situation. Since it is likely that I got my abyssmal vision from my mother, and such things are usually genetic--not to mention passed down from the female--there is a good chance my children will suffer a similar affliction. From now on I have to keep a close eye (ha) on The Boss to see if she starts sitting on top of the television or holding books one inch from her face. Or tripping over her feet because she can't see what's in front of her--that would probably be a good clue, too. It's what happened to me.

My mother still speaks with venom about the pediatrician who repeatedly told her to yell at me for my scatter-brained ways when she kept bringing up to him my clumsiness. Though my mother thought there must be something wrong with someone so completely out of touch with balance, the doctor just figured I was in my own little world and needed to be jolted back to reality every so often. It wasn't until over a year later that she finally took me to an eye doctor who determined I was not only seeing poorly, but I saw single objects in multiples. It was no wonder I was falling all over myself. Though my mother was always the first and the proudest to say that I tripped along to the beat of a different drummer, she knew there had been something a bit extreme about my strange parade.

My main hope is that my children have their father's vision--but in the absence of that, I hope I can uncover any vision issues early so that they can get back to exploring their world with eyes wide open and fully functional.

I have to wonder if my inability to see far is what helped to direct me early on toward books, which I could hold close to my face as they opened up whole new worlds of imagination inside my head. If so, then at least I can justify the trials of my early four-eyed existence that way. I probably wouldn't be the person I am today without my start as the cross-eyed klutz who morphed into a bookworm with Coke bottle glasses.

So, it's not that bad, really. And we all know that it's also not nearly as bad as it could've been. Thank God I wasn't born a cavewoman.