This started out as a story time email.
As my isolation continues and I get even deeper into both my introspection and looking for things to do that are marginally productive, like going through old documents where I found this.
I think I need my therapist again.
I was crossed eyed when I was a kid.
I hope you weren’t expecting a sexy story.
My libido is through the roof and I just can’t right now.
One of my earliest memories was my mother shrieking in the kitchen, I had to wear an eye patch. It gave me a headache and bandages in the 70’s were gooey and sticky and it hurt coming off. I was hiding behind my dad’s chair in the living room. She found me and the patch went on. That probably happened every other day for 100 days.
The idea was to force the muscles in my weak eye to work by covering my good eye.
Didn’t work.
I could read when I was 22 months old. We had those Disney read along records, and I just taught myself. But with the patch on I couldn’t read. I still have a hard time reading with just my right eye, I can see the words, but they don’t compute exactly.
I had corrective surgery when I was just a bit over 2 years old.
My parent’s friends from Michigan had bought a farm in Ontario a year or 2 before my folks and they remain close to this day. Carolyn and Todd. Carolyn gave me a stuffed dog as a surgery present. She was my magic mama.
This story was prompted by me opening the closet in my attic room last night and seeing Snoopy in the corner.
Yep, I still have him. And yes, he was part of the important ‘stuff’ that came with me from Newfoundland.
A few years back my girlfriend was very into Feng Shui and decided we couldn’t have stuffed animals in our rooms, especially not on our beds. They are bed guardians and keep potential lovers away. Snoopy will be emerging from the closet and making his way to my bed sometime today. I have a lover, the only one I ever want. A stuffed dog can guard my bed while I wait.
My eye doctor was this really sweet old man. He had polio when he was young and was in a wheelchair. I wish I could remember his name, I can see his face and hear his voice as I write this. He was the one who diagnosed me with Poland Syndrome weirdly. He studied odd physical deformities as a hobby.
I remember the old wooden box full of glass lenses. The dark of his office. The bright lights in my eyes and wearing too big sunglasses when we left because of the drops he put in to dilate my pupils made my eyes super light sensitive. The clack of the machinery, ‘which one is better, one or two’.
I remember getting a chocolate bar at the hospital gift shop if I behaved.
I ended up in that hospital a lot between 2 and 19. First my eye then my tit.
My poor mom. She wanted a child, tried so hard for 7 years to conceive before I was born, and she got me, a weird fixer upper.
I say that with a bit of bitterness. She has, as the years gone on, expressed resentment that I needed more time and effort than her other daughters. Physically and emotionally. But let’s skip over that.
I remember wanting to take Snoopy into the O.R. More shrieking from my mother. A nurse said he couldn’t come but compromised by letting me take some plastic zoo animals in with me, I can only assume because they could be sterilized and Snoopy could not.
I don’t remember much from the hospital. Just sitting on the floor in a hospital gown in the playroom playing with those plastic animals. Everything was white and the sun was streaming in the window. Then laying on the stretcher with a rhino in my tiny hand.
The next thing I remember is waking up and throwing up a lot. And I was blind. Not really but I was maybe 26 months old, so I couldn’t comprehend what was happening. My eyes were bandaged. Apparently, I had a reaction to the anesthetic, and they couldn’t wake me up properly for a few days.
Next memory after that was waking up on the couch at home and my eyes were stuck shut. Like every bit of eye pook I would ever have had appeared overnight and was gluing my eyelashes together.
I remember thinking that I had gone blind forever. Todd’s dad was blind and my tiny child’s brain was afraid that I had looked at an eclipse, like I thought he had done. He didn’t, but I believed that for years.
I remember being quiet as a mouse and touching my eyes even though I wasn’t supposed to, trying to get the gook off. I succeeded and the process repeated itself for at leas a week. Wake up blind, quietly unstick my eyes.
I can still cross that one eye. I looked at some selfies today and in 2/3 that one eye looks a little crossed still. Maybe it’s me seeing things with my overly critical way of seeing myself.
There is a 98% chance of becoming near sighted after the corrective surgery. Something about tightening the muscles altering the shape of the eye itself.
So, I have been wearing glasses since I was 3 or 4. Tiny little kid, with glasses and a bad bowl cut. My mom also had a penchant for giving me perms. I was a terribly awkward child. I had a really bad stutter on top of everything else. Speech therapist said my vocabulary was too big for my mouth. I managed to get over it by the time I started kindergarten. It comes back if I am stressed or if I see, hear or read about someone with a stutter.
We moved when I was 7 and I started grade 2 at a different rural school. Not fun.
People like to say that I am used to being told I am pretty. I am really not. It wasn’t something I was told as a kid, even into my teenage years. I was just awkward and angry by then and had the added yuck of braces and one of those fake boobs that resemble a chicken cutlet they give to women who had mastectomies stuffed in my bra.
This is also why I worry about being a burden. At some point I realized if I just tried to do things on my own, I wasn’t bothering anyone. If I just stayed away from people as much as possible, I wasn’t bothering anyone. It’s just part of who I am now.
Some days I am that scared little girl hiding behind the big brown chair, somehow knowing I was making it worse the longer I hid and louder my mom screamed and still being unable to move. I still feel so insignificant that if I hide long enough, I will be forgotten. Part of me wants to be.
And, as I have wasted another day, scrolling through social media, instead of doing anything that might possibly improve my situation, I honestly don’t know how to break out of this.
All I have to do is commit to and survive some discomfort to strengthen some long atrophied muscles.
I have to stop hiding and I don’t know how.
