first the glasses, then the reading.

A pregnant mother doing laundry in the basement while her eighteen month old daughter plays in the cabinets that were recently removed from the kitchen suddenly realizes the cabinets are about to fall on her baby. Frightened, and huge, she moves the cabinets one by one to find her daughter trapped inside the one on the bottom. Completely unharmed and scared to death, the mother is so thankful. However, when she calls her daughter’s name she notices that her eyes don’t look at her. Upon meeting with an eye doctor and learning that her child has a severe stigmatism she is relieved and worried all at the same time. Not even able to read yet and prescribed bi-focals, what a sight (no pun intended)!

“So she has a weak eye, what can we do?”
“You could try patching her good eye to strengthen the weak one” the doctor tells the mother.

And that’s how it all started. I couldn’t even read yet and I was already wearing glasses. Every night for the next few years I was told to sit at the kitchen table, with a patch over my “good” eye, and color in all the loops in The Washington Post. Every “a”, “o” “d”, excreta was colored in. After a while the sessions became less strict and the tasks more complicated. When I learned the alphabet and how to write my name I was to circle all the letters in my name. Let me tell you, I have a lot of vowels in my name and a common letter “y”. That was a lot of circling, no doubt. The occasional eye checkups mentioned nothing just that my eye sight was not that great. But by the time I entered kindergarten, the eye doctor couldn’t even recognize which eye had been the weak one.

I may not have been reading at this point, at least not anything that I could remember. But part of literacy is having the knowledge of the alphabet and a starting point could be something as simple as knowing how to write your own name. This was my kick-off. Although my eyes were untraceable of any stigmatisms, my eye sight was still not so great. Unfortunately (I say this because my glasses were ridiculously hideous) I continued to wear glasses and still do.