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I might keep a few extra
pairs of glasses around the house -
or around my face.
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I yelled for my daughter who searched while I trailed her, whining over and over that I couldn't find my glasses without my glasses.
When my daughter found my specs, I put them on with the nerve-racked, shaky-handed gratitude of someone handed nitroglycerin tablets in just the nick of time. I sat on the edge of my creaking old quilt-covered bed, and it hit me:
- I'm a woman of a certain age.
- I need my glasses to find my glasses.
- The bed wasn't creaking, it was me!
Then I realized that glasses had been dangling my future dotage before my failing eyes for years.
I didn't have children until I was in my forties. When I was forty-three and getting an eye exam, the optometrist broke the news that it was time for my first pair of bifocals. Hand to God, the words that flew from my mouth at that moment were: "I can't need bifocals - I have babies at home!"
For years I'd thought that dual umbilical cords were carrying sustenance from my ovaries to my eyeballs and that having children that late in life, my eyeballs were returning the favor. But for that to be true, my inner workings would have to look like an Escher print.
Then there was the adult movie with a scene that depressed me for years. This movie (which I might have heard about, not necessarily seen!) depicted women, age 50-plus, getting a lot of, shall we say, attention, from younger men. A woman in one of the vignettes was wearing reading glasses and never took them off despite them slipping ever closer to the end of her nose. Now I understand that she didn't take them off because she needed them to see what was happening.
Forgetting where I've left my glasses is bound to happen again. And blaming my glasses, as though they're at fault by forgetting where they put my face, won't help. It's time to accept the facts. I'm getting older.
But that doesn't mean I can't still love who I am, and even who I see whenever I look in the mirror. And it doesn't mean I can't see myself in the best light possible even if I need the best light possible to see myself.
We crawl, then we walk, then we walk a little slower. All the better for seeing what's most important and what is truly beautiful.
