My wife Edith and I were both born in 1960 and we were in the same grade all through school. At first she was a girl, and no young boy wanted anything to do with girls, so to me she was just one of those pesky girls in my class. However, once we progressed into the teenage years and some of my friends began to express interest in girls Edie and I gradually became friends. Then when we were both 15 I actually asked Edie to go to a high school dance with me. Before I knew it we were going steady. And the next thing I knew was that the year we both turned 21 we were married. It certainly helped that Edie was a very easy going girl, and as a result our marriage has lasted almost 35 years.
When I first started going out with Edie she did not wear glasses. I had already noticed that I liked the looks of girls who wore glasses, but of the girls I knew that did wear glasses not one of them attracted my interest romantically. When Edie was 17 she discovered that she was having a little trouble with her distance vision. She had passed her eye exam for her driver’s license the previous year without glasses so it was a little bit of a surprise when she was prescribed her first pair of glasses with a prescription of -0.75D for both eyes. When she asked the optometrist if she should wear her glasses for driving he told her that she probably should, but she still met the minimum requirement for driving without them.
I rather enjoyed seeing Edie wearing her glasses, but she really didn’t wear them enough to satisfy me. Once in a while they came out when she was driving me home at night after visiting a few friends. She would not let me drive after I had anything to drink, likely a very good idea. Once in a while, when we went to the movies, I would bug her to bring her glasses so we could sit a bit further back.
I had read enough about myopia to know that it was almost certain that her eyes would get worse and I waited for her next eye exam with great anticipation. At 19 there was no change. She did get new glasses, but they were exactly the same prescription as her old ones. Then her next exam was the year we were married. Again she got new glasses, and once again her prescription remained the same.
I was beginning to lose hope that Edie would ever need stronger glasses. However I had read an article in a magazine that indicated that nearsighted people would sometimes experience a jump in their myopia during pregnancy. Ken, our son was born when Edie was 24. And after the pregnancy her prescription had not changed at all. Ken was 3 when Katie came along. I was hoping that this time would be the charm. Katie’s pregnancy didn’t change a thing and when Edie went off for her next eye exam she hadn’t even gained a quarter of a diopter. I was frustrated. We were planning to have one more child, and that was it. If there was no increase in Edie’s prescription with this pregnancy I was, as they say, schitt out of luck. And you guessed it. With Amanda’s birth there was no change at all in her mom’s prescription.
As the kids grew I anticipated that at least one of the girls would develop a little bit of myopia. After all, the visual demands of school had increased a lot since Edie and I had been in school. But here we were, 15 years after Amanda was born, and not one of the kids needed glasses. Talk about frustrating!
When Mandy was 15 the house next door to us was sold. We met our new neighbors the day they moved in and found that they were a nice young couple with a 3 month old baby girl. As we got to know them a little better they asked if Mandy could baby sit once in a while if they wanted to go out, and of course Mandy agreed. For the next couple of years Mandy was the go to babysitter for Maren, but by the time Maren was about 30 months of age Mandy was heading off to university and would no longer be available to babysit.
By this time Edie and I had gotten to know Rob and Jamie quite well. Again I am not sure how it happened, but before long Edie and I had replaced Mandy as Maren’s main babysitter. Ron and Jamie didn’t go out that often, so it really was not a problem for us to look after Maren and by the time Maren was 5 she had turned into the nicest kid imaginable. She was smart, and inquisitive and both Edie and I thought that it was too bad that Jamie could not have any more children because Maren would have made a wonderful big sister.
Maren always came to our house after school the year she was in kindergarten and she stayed until Jamie came home from work. The following year she was in grade 1 and I noticed that Maren seemed to be bringing her coloring book up fairly close to her face. I also noticed that when she was watching television she seemed to want to sit fairly close to the screen. I was beginning to think that I might just have found my myope in Maren, and this was confirmed to me when I saw her reading some of her storybooks. I didn’t say a thing to Rob and Jamie. I figured that either her teacher would notice something was wrong, or else Rob and Jamie would.
Maren’s teacher was the first one to notice it, and she sent a note home to Jamie that politely suggested that Maren might benefit from an eye exam. Jamie was a little upset about this for a couple of reasons. The main reason was that she felt badly that she had not noticed this herself, and the second was that she was on duty at the pharmacy where she worked every weekday for the next two weeks. Since I start work at 6 am, and am generally home by 3 I suggested that if Jamie was able to get an appointment after school with the eye doctor I would be glad to take her to the appointment. Because the local optometrist was the same one that Edie had always gone to I also suggested that it might not hurt if Edie made the call to the receptionist to see if we could get the doctor to squeeze Maren in for an after school appointment.
Maren did need glasses. Her first prescription, while not earth shattering, was still a healthy -1.50D. And the eye doctor suggested that Maren should have a follow up appointment within a year. Unlike my wife Edie, who had always felt that her -0.75D prescription was not bad enough that she needed to wear her glasses full time, once Maren started to wear her new glasses she was hardly ever seen without them. My own experiences with my wife and my children had been unable to fulfil my desire to have a myopic person in my life and I had hopes that Maren would prove to be even more myopic as time went on.
Although Maren didn’t have really huge jumps in her prescription she did have fairly steady increases as she grew older. Her first increase was about a year and a half after she originally got her glasses, and her prescription increased to -3.00D. I think she had a little bit of astigmatism as well, but I had not seen her prescription slip and didn’t feel like I should ask too many questions. I do know that by the time Maren was somewhere between 12 and 13 her prescription had increased to around -6D and she was still wearing regular plastic lenses. She wanted contact lenses in the worst way and one afternoon after school she and I had a really good chat. I told her that she was very pretty, and that wearing glasses did not detract from her good looks at all. I also told her that if she did not feel confident about her attractiveness when she was wearing glasses, if she got contact lenses then she would always be very self-conscious about her appearance if she had to go out wearing glasses. I also suggested that if a guy found her attractive when she was wearing contacts it was possible that he would not care for her appearance wearing glasses, but if he found her attractive wearing glasses then when she did decide to wear contacts for special occasions he would find her drop dead gorgeous.
I also told Maren that the biggest reason for suggesting that she didn’t get contacts was that contact lenses are prescribed for a person’s full distance prescription. Schoolwork requires a lot of close reading, and when wearing contacts your eyes are having to focus through the power of the contacts, which might possibly encourage her eyes to get worse and worse. But if she kept wearing her glasses, which of course are also set for a person’s full distance prescription, all glasses seem have a tendency to slide down a person’s nose when they are reading. This effectively reduces the prescription the person doing the reading is looking through. So the glasses don’t tend to increase the person’s myopia as much, or as fast.
I don’t know if Maren believed me, but while she did get contact lenses when she was 15 she really didn’t wear them a lot. She did wear them when she was going out with guys and sometimes on weekends, but most days she could be seen wearing her glasses. Once Maren turned 13 she no longer came by the house after school every day, and I really missed seeing her.
When Maren graduated from high school she went off to a community college where she was going to be takin a course in online marketing. Before she left for her first day of college she stopped by the house to say goodbye to Edie and myself. She was now almost 18, and she had on a brand new pair of glasses. The lenses did look to be fairly strong, but they must have been the highest index plastic available because there was no significant protrusion behind the plastic frame. I did ask her how strong her new glasses were, and she told me that they were around -12D. I told her that she looked wonderful wearing them, and she just smiled at me and said thanks.
Maren graduated in the spring. When she came by to give Edie and me our wedding invitation it was easy for me to tell that she had added a couple of diopters to the prescription she was wearing in her new glasses over the 3 years that she had been at college. I suspected that her progression likely had ended now, and I was happy to see that she had ended up with a strong enough prescription that she would be unable to go for that laser eye surgery that so many people were having. I was also pleased that she was getting married, and that apparently her new husband was completely at ease with her wearing glasses that were reasonably strong.
I no longer have Maren around as my own personal myope, but while she was growing up her myopic progression was enough to overcome my frustration over the lack of any significant myopia in my own family.
Specs4ever Jan 2016