“Vision Correction”

My mother was calling my name, her voice growing hoarser with each call. She was looking for me. I had been missing for over an hour, having managed to cram myself in the space between the couch and the wall. I was hiding.

She stopped in the living room and called out my brother’s name. He promptly came, ever the golden boy. Back then, his hair had yet to darken so that this statement was literally true as well as metaphorically.

“I can’t find her anywhere in the house. I think she might have gone outside,” my mother said. “She couldn’t have gone far. You have to find here. I’ll stay here if she comes back. I hope she doesn’t cross the street. ”

Now, I cringe at the memory but then I was delighted, hiding behind the couch and hearing every word of my mother was saying. That evil woman was making me wear that thing, even at preschool, and I was showing her. My brother and sister didn’t have to wear one; why should I? Why did I have to be different?

“Don’t worry,” My brother said, puffed up with this responsibility. “I’ll find her.”

He didn’t find me. To be honest, no one found me. My sister started watching television and I popped out of my hide-out on my own accord. I wanted to watch, too. I was bored and the thrill of my subterfuge was gone. Of course, my sister claimed false credit for my capture.

“Mom! She was behind the couch.”

I glared my sister for revealing my genius hiding space. My mother appeared. She turned off the television and stood in front of it.

“You,” my mother said. “are never leaving my sight again.”

She grabbed my eye-patch from behind the couch and stuck it tightly to my head.

Why was my mother so insistent I wear that patch? I had amblyopia, which causes strabismus. Too much Latin? I had a lazy eye, though “lazy eye” is a misnomer. My left eye was not lazy. Rather, my brain was lazy. The image from my left eye was dim and as a result, my brain suppressed it. This created a clearer image for my brain to digest but had the unfortunate consequence of weakening my left eye. If this condition is left unchecked, the inevitable result is that the weaker eye goes blind. Luckily, the solution is simple. If the brain won’t use the weaker eye on its own, make it. So my parents had my dominant eye covered, so my lazy brain had no choice, at least the first time.

I saw a girl with a patch recently. It was sky-blue with a sunflower blooming on it in impressive details. She didn’t seem to be concerned with it at all but if she had been, I’m not sure I could have stopped myself from telling her how lucky she was. My patch was thin and black. It was an eye patch like those worn by sinister villains and pirates. Hers looked to be tucked onto her glasses. Mine had a strap that’s sole purpose seemed to be to irritate me and ruin whatever hairstyle my mother had coaxed the mess atop my head into.

I started wearing the patch for the first time when I was thirteen months old. That time I was too young to properly rebel. I probably just accepted it as normal and went about doing whatever it is thirteen month-olds do. An eye-patch probably didn’t hinder my ability to drool and eat crayons.

When I had to wear it in preschool, I really put up a fight. I kicked. I screamed. I ran. I hide my patch and only taking away my television privileges could compel me to retrieve it. As a result, the second time, optometrists prescribed the patch, my mother refused. She could not handle another stint trying to restrain a child, who not only resembled a villain but acted the part. Instead, the doctors prescribed drops that would blur the vision in my right eye, which had its own hang-ups. My grandfather protested, unable to understand the benefit to half-blinding me, how something he saw as hurtful could help. Nonetheless, my parents persevered until what my family refers to now as “The Age of the Patch” was over. I still wore glasses, thick glasses that magnified my eyes such that at the age of eleven, I looked like a miniature nutty professor. I dreamed of contacts like a prisoner dreams of liberation.  At thirteen, I finally got them.  I was no longer “the girl with glasses.”My vision and my appearance were finally like everybody else’s. Of course, as it often is when one is sure of something, I was wrong.

“Get out of the road, you stupid cow!”

My friend had sprinted halfway across the road, now perched in the middle lane, traffic flying past her on both sides. I could feel the cars’ speed on my skin on the side of the road as their ironcast bodies shoved air out of their way. That was when a car started barreling towards her. My reaction was immediate and heartfelt. While I meant everything I said when I called her a stupid cow, I did not want her to get hit. I didn’t even want her to be jostled. In shock, I watched as she remained exactly in the same spot, staring ahead rather than sideways. The car continued its trajectory, full speed and I just watched as the car slid past her instead of slamming into her. She looked back at us again, calling out that we were idiots not to join her.

The rest of the group had been watching her with mere interest. While everyone else had decided to walk to the crosswalk rather than brave the five lanes of busy traffic, my intrepid friend had forged ahead. Her impatience was amusing, her recklessness troubling, and her expectation for us to follow ridiculous. Yet, now their gazes had turned to me with that same what-is-this-weird-girl-doing now look they had treated her to. I chuckled sheepishly, shifting my weight from one foot to the other.

“It’s my eyesight,” I said. “I don’t have good depth perception. It looked like she was going to get hit.”

They nodded but I wasn’t quite sure they understood.

I felt shaken and betrayed. While that moment I spent thinking a friend of mine was going to become a Honda’s over-sized hood ornament was upsetting, relief swept it away the instant she turned out to be okay. No, something else was troubling me as I stared at the cars blurring past us.

The flaws of my perception confronted me. My eyes could not be trusted; if seeing is believing, what are you supposed to do when you see wrong?  What if the car was heading toward her and I saw it as next to her? How could I be sure that things really were as I saw them? The answer came as my friends laughed and talked, walking slightly ahead of me. I couldn’t be sure.

I still drove, partly because stopping would be impossible. It would be an admission. Of what, I can’t precisely say. Partly I wanted to be like every other teenager and partly, I felt confident that through cautiousness, I could compensate for any failures. Still, I lived uneasily with uncertainty, which occupied my mind like an unwanted houseguest. It was easiest to ignore it, until I started staring at it straight in the face.

My left eye, ever so slightly, was turning in. I was wearing my glasses and still it was turning in. Again, I tried to put it out of my mind. I was told it was hardly noticeable by the various people I creepily harassed into staring me straight in the eye. It was not normal. Something had to be wrong and that something had to be fixed. After all that work with the patch, after years and years of glasses, then contacts, I should have had what I wanted, what many people were born with.  The thought that I might have to return to glasses, that I might once again be defined by a flaw plagued. Intellectually, I knew many people wore glasses and that it wouldn’t be too big of a deal but at the same time, I knew that I wouldn’t be wearing just any glasses. I would be wearing glasses that would make Harry Potter cringe. My vision would be constrained to two thick glass ovals in front of my face and I would be cursed to push my glasses up the bridge of my nose into eternity. Besides, that lack of depth perception that had caused me to yell at a friend nonsensically was still an issue, somehow linked to my tilting eye. In my mind, I deserved perfect vision. I deserved contacts. At the very least, I deserved to back out of my driveway without nagging fear. I deserved to be sure.

A few weeks later, I ended up at one of the best optometry wings in the world, despite the uncomfortable, grey pleather chairs. I had been to the eye doctor enough times to know what to expect. Or at least I thought I had. An intern walked into the room and listened to my concerns or at least I think she did; she didn’t make eye contact, too busy scrawling. When I was done, she stopped and dropper her pen, finally looking up at my mother and me.

“So, how do you feel about surgery?” she asked, unconcernedly. My mother and I exchanged shocked looks. My eye only wandered a little and she wanted to put me under anesthesia, cut into my head, and play around uncomfortably close to my brain.

“Um . . . ” I replied. “Is it necessary?”

She shrugged.

“It’s the only way to make them straight. That’s all it would do. Your slant is within range of normal. It doesn’t affect your vision as it is.”

So, the surgery wouldn’t fix my problems. It would only make it appear as if there wasn’t a problem. That wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t going through surgery for such a minor change and for a moment, I stepped out of my perfectionist, conformist haze to question why having my eye tilt just a little was worth getting so worked up about and why a small difference between what I saw and what actually was there really mattered. Did I truly think, despite many people’s protestations that other people noticed? If I was an unsafe driver, why did I drive every single day without incident? Did I think anyone sees perfectly?

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” I found myself saying. On the car ride home, my mother and I reminisced about my long and varied optometric history. At that time, the memory served as a funny little anecdote, not something that could have affected the course of my entire life.

“You are really lucky,” my mother finally said, torn between amusement and something more somber. “I worked so hard to keep that patch on you. I wore you on my back all day.”

I gave something between a laugh and a sigh for lack of a better reaction.

“It’s terrible, though,” she continued, her tone moving more towards the somber side of the spectrum, “not every parent takes it seriously. At my school, some parents are just too young and they think it doesn’t matter. By the time they realize their child only can use one eye, it’s too late. It can only be fixed in early childhood.”

Her words made the situation all the more cringe-worthy. For the first time, I realized I had already been fixed. My mother fixed me, maybe not to the level of some other people, but I saw well enough; I could see with two eyes. It was my brain that was the problem, thinking that any flaw, any uncertainty was something to obsess over, plagued by perfectionism that no optometrist could write a prescription for. I couldn’t say all these revelations to her. I couldn’t thank her without exposing the lump in my throat.

“All right,” I said, “I forgive you for making me look ridiculous.”

My mother scoffed and didn’t let that statement go until I had driven us home.

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