Wherein I See Something in a New Light
Both sides of my family have history of Strabismus (crossed eyes) and amblyopia (lazy eye). My father’s cousin and my mother’s brother both have eye alignment issues, though to a lesser degree. I was born, as you see, quite severely cross-eyed. Also, a red head, which is the more surprising of the two, in some ways.
When I was just shy of 3 years old, I had the first corrective surgery meant to address the condition. My mother was working for the State of Oregon in the Food Stamp office, and we had decent medical insurance, for which I am grateful.
Up to that point, I suffered from extreme double vision and had considerable difficulty navigating the world. My older sister, and the occasional adult when they noticed, would stop me from running full tilt into stationary objects my little brain could not accurately locate in 3 dimensional space.
After surgery, my left eye began dominating. It straightened out and began delivering reliable visual cues about the world around me. Unfortunately, my right eye didn’t follow suit. The repair on those muscles didn’t produce the alignment that would result in stereoscopic vision unaided. The ophthalmologists warned my mother that I would need to wear an eye patch over my stronger eye to allow my weaker eye to engage and start communicating fully with my brain.
Soon after, my mother quit her well-paying benefits delivering job because they announced that employees would need to submit to drug testing. As turned out to be extremely typical of her, she chose her life-long love of marijuana over financial stability and access to healthcare for her children.
Even without the ongoing supportive care of an eye doctor, the use of an eye patch was well within the scope of home treatment. And yet, she didn’t make me wear it. She told me later, when I asked her why, that the adhesive on the patches made my face break out. It is breathtaking to me now, that this was enough for her to simply abandon the effort to rehabilitate my vision.
As with a lot of things my mother said to me through the years, I didn’t think too deeply about it; she had a tendency to trot out glib and often cruel justifications for her actions that were usually best ignored.
I have come to the realization since her death how often those justifications were completely unsatisfying and frankly, bullshit. One of the many emotional epiphanies I have experienced in the wake of her passing is how much I had closed myself off from acknowledging any anger toward her.
She was a person profoundly unwilling to admit her own responsibility for the circumstances of her life. Challenging her on anything always resulted in heated conflict and often estrangement. The last time I did so, she chose to exclude me from her life completely and through its very end.
My desire to maintain and ultimately reconcile a relationship with her made it impossible to acknowledge any anger I might hold toward her, justified or otherwise. I did such a good job at this I had largely convinced myself I wasn’t angry at her at all.
Only once that reconciliation was made impossible by her death did all the safeguards protecting myself from those feelings give way. A dam broken by the flood of tears, unmended and ultimately abandoned in the rewilding of the river of my heart.
Last night, as I was driving somewhere in the dark night of 6:00 pm I was lamenting my aging eyesight. Like a thunderbolt, a realization split me open and gripped my heart so tightly I couldn’t draw full breath.
My mother failed me in many ways, but probably none so permanently and profoundly impactful as her neglect of my post-surgical eyesight recovery.
As a result of her inaction I am legally blind in one eye. I do not have depth perception. I have suffered significant social stigma – and a powerful associated anxiety – from having a lazy eye. I was mocked, ridiculed, and on the receiving end of incredibly cruel comments from both adults and children all through my childhood, My condition damaged my self-image tremendously for many years.
A little over a year ago, I underwent an additional surgery to correct the alignment of my eyes. Now, only someone who is actively looking for it would be able to notice the slight in-turning of my right eye.
Having corrected this has earnestly changed how I experience the world in a profound way. I am willing to make eye contact with strangers and have noticed a significant shift in how I encounter new people and how they respond to me in kind. I wonder – as I do about many things – how differently my life would have unfolded if my parents had been capable of or willing to take care of me. To address my physical, emotional, and intellectual needs.
I am grateful that I became the person who could, after all.
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