According to My Specs

Last week, I experienced a rite of passage when, for the first time, I couldn't find my glasses because I wasn't wearing them. 

I might keep a few extra 

pairs of glasses around the house - 

or around my face. 

I remember my grandmother puddling around, in search of the glasses she had set down somewhere but couldn't find later. I yelled for my daughter who searched while I trailed her, whining repeatedly that I couldn't find my glasses without my glasses. My daughter gently pressed them into my palm like Annie Sullivan handing Helen Keller a fork, and 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 can't read font smaller than 18-point sans-serif without my glasses, because even New Times Roman looks like संस्कृत without them. संस्कृत means Sanskrit, by the way. 

- The bed wasn't creaking; it was me.

I didn't have children until I was in my forties. When I was forty-three and having an eye exam, the optometrist announced that it was time for my first pair of bifocals, to which I blurted, "I can't need bifocals! I have babies at home!" Because I'd easily gotten pregnant in my forties, I presumed that my amped up ovaries would send sustenance to my eyeballs via dual umbilical cords and preserve my vision. But for that to be true, my insides would have to resemble an Escher print, which I doubt they do. 

On my fiftieth birthday, someone showed me a clip from an adult movie depicting women, age 50-plus, getting a lot of, shall we say, attention, from younger men. One woman never took her glasses 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 left my face, won't help. It's just another reminder that I am aging, which doesn't mean I can't still see myself in the best light possible, even if I need the best light possible to see myself.