I just got home from a birthday celebration for my 23rd birthday with my dad. After we got home from the restaurant he took out an ice cream birthday cake from the freezer and he sang Happy Birthday to me. Then we both ate enough ice cream to get brain freeze. He is so thoughtful and kind I often can’t believe what a super dad he is.
My dad has been my only parent since my mom left us just before I was 3 years old. I seem to remember that I was devastated about mom leaving at the time. I only have a slight memory of coming downstairs in the morning looking for my dad and mom, and finding my dad on his hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. There was a pile of towels beside him that had turned all red from what ever he was scrubbing, and when I asked him where mommy was he told me that she didn’t love us anymore and had left us to go off with her boyfriend. I do remember daddy telling me to be very careful where I stepped because he had dropped a ketchup bottle and it had broken, spilling the ketchup all over the place. He scrubbed the floor for a very long time with bleach and I remember that the kitchen smelled like bleach the rest of the short time we lived there.
I think I remember going back up to my room and crying after daddy told me that mommy left. I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend and I wasn’t sure when she would have had the time to find one because she was busy looking after me. I guess she must have found one when I was at the daycare and she was at work. I know I was sad for a long time that mommy had left, because the night before she left she told me that she loved me more than anything in the world. The one good thing about mommy leaving was that she and daddy didn’t fight all the time anymore.
Daddy is a carpenter, and we often have to move to different places where there is lots of building going on so he can get jobs. We had moved a couple of times since I was born, and while I don’t remember those other times I know that daddy told me that we had moved before. This time I was worried when we moved a few days after mommy left that mommy wouldn’t know where to find us, and I was really sad all over again when daddy told me that mommy would find us if she wanted to, but he knew she didn’t want to find us because she probably would start another family now.
Soon after we moved to the new house I got my first pair of glasses. I don’t remember anything about getting the glasses, but I do remember that daddy had a hard time at first getting me to wear them. But he told the lady that looked after me during the day that I needed to wear them all the time, so she made sure I was wearing them all day. Then at night and first thing in the morning daddy made me wear them, and he would get cross with me if I didn’t. I know that I didn’t want daddy to be cross with me because I was afraid that he would leave me like mommy did. So I did wear my glasses all the time.
Around the time I was 4 I misplaced my glasses somewhere. I didn’t know where they could be because I always took them off at night and placed them in the exact same spot on my dresser. I was sure I had done that the night before, but they were not there in the morning. I was surprised that daddy didn’t seem to be angry that I had lost my glasses, but he wasn’t. Daddy took me to an eye doctor and this time I remember sitting in a chair behind a machine and the doctor asking me which is better. Then daddy got me another pair of glasses. The new glasses were kind of hard to wear at first, but I soon got used to wearing them all the time. The funniest thing happened a few weeks after I got my new glasses. Daddy found my old glasses in the laundry. I just don’t know how they got there.
I remember that daddy used to tease me and call me Zero. I was 4 years old and my new glasses were -4D, so if you subtracted -4 from 4 you got zero. I know I got new glasses when I was 5, again when I was 6, and still again when I was 7, and for all those years daddy still called me Zero. But then when I was 8 my glasses were -8.50D and daddy could no longer call me Zero because he told me that I was now less than zero, and nobody could be less than zero.
I don’t remember much about my glasses after that. I do know that whenever I got new, stronger glasses every year my dad would also buy me prescription swim goggles so that I could see well enough to swim at the community pool. There was always a community pool around wherever we moved. And then he also bought me special glasses with unbreakable lenses that strapped around my head every year when I needed a new prescription so that I could wear them when I played girls softball and soccer. But then the eye doctor that I went to at the time told my dad that I shouldn’t play sports like baseball because there was too great a chance that I might have a retinal detachment. After that I didn’t play soccer, or baseball or basketball anymore. I didn’t like that, because I had enjoyed playing sports, but the thought of a retinal detachment really scared me because the doctor told me that if a person had a retinal detachment they could end up going blind.
I do know that by the time I was 13 I had a glasses prescription of -14D, because that is when my dad bought me contact lenses. I wore contacts all the time from the time I was 13 on. My dad was such a thoughtful person. My contacts were the ones you could wear for 30 days and then you threw them out. When it came time for me to change to a new pair of contacts dad would have them all ready for me in a brand new lens case. He did this every month for as long as I was able to wear contacts.
I was searching through dad’s stuff one day not long ago and I came across a binder that dad kept notes in about the progression of my myopia. There was an entry every year around my birthday that gave my new prescription for my glasses. Then when I started wearing contacts, my first prescription was -10.50D for my contacts. Then 4 months later he wrote -11D, and 4 months after that he wrote -11.50D. I really don’t remember going to the eye doctor every few months so I guess the eye doctor had just given dad the new, stronger contacts for me to wear every 4 months. This went on until I was 17 and when I turned 17 my contacts again matched my age. But dad didn’t call me Zero again, because he said my glasses had to be a lot stronger than my contacts. When I had another eye exam a few months later while I was still 17 the doctor told him that I needed to have something called prism in my glasses. I hadn’t noticed it, but my dad had and he told the doctor that when I was tired my eyes seemed to wander out. So the doctor prescribed prisms, but apparently you can’t get prism in contacts.
By the time I approached my 18th birthday I was a glasses wearer again. My glasses now were extremely thick and I couldn’t believe how bad my eyes had gotten. The nice thing about wearing contacts was that no one could see how bad my eyes were by the thickness of my glasses. I had a prescription of -20D for both eyes with 2 degrees of base out prism. But I was able to see just fine with my glasses, even though I didn’t like wearing them much. Contacts were a lot better. I felt much prettier when I didn’t have to wear my thick glasses. I had been very popular with the guys when I was wearing my contacts, and while I still had boyfriends after I started wearing my new glasses I wasn’t nearly as popular.
My dad told me that my bad eyes came from my mom. There were a few pictures of mom still around the house, and I looked at them from time to time. Yes, mom wore glasses in most of the pictures, but they didn’t look to be that thick. And that time when I was looking around in dads stuff while he was at work I found a pair of ladies glasses in with his collection of all my old glasses as well as that notebook with all my prescriptions. These had to have been an old pair of my mom’s glasses, but when I looked through them they sure didn’t seem too strong. Since mom had bad eyes too she must have been wearing her glasses when she left, so maybe her newer glasses were a lot stronger.
Thinking of my mom made me wonder why we had never visited my mom’s parents. My dad had never called them, and as far as I know he had never written them to let them know where we were. Maybe he was so angry with my mom that he didn’t ever want to see them again. I guess that must have been the reason.
When I was 17 and was still wearing contacts I was contacted by a model agency to see if I wanted to be a model. But then I had to start wearing glasses again, and when I went to see them after that they told me that I would not be able to be a model unless I could wear contacts. But I couldn’t so I had to find something else to do to earn a living. Dad hadn’t wanted me to go off to be a model, so I guess it was lucky for him that I needed prisms. He wanted me to go into nursing, or some other medical related field. I took some courses at our community college, and I did get my medical assistants degree by the time I was 22. It took me a while to find a job in a doctor’s office, but I am now working full time for a really nice GP and I love my job. I want to get my own apartment, and stay here in this city if my dad moves on, but if I do it will break his heart to let me go.
Unfortunately for me my eyes did not stop getting worse when I turned 18. During the last 5 years until now my glasses prescription has climbed to -26.00D with 5 degrees of base out prism. My current eye doctor tells me that I am fortunate to have both eyes the exact same prescription and to not have anything called astigmatism because I can get a better correction than someone with astigmatism can. My current glasses are a very nice pair of biconcave myodiscs. The frame is white, with black accents and everyone tells me that they look quite nice on my face. I know that they are really just saying that they look nice even though they are so thick and strong looking, but there is nothing I can do about that.
I have had a number of boy friends over the past few years since I started wearing glasses again. But then we move on before I can get too serious with any of them. I was a little upset with my dad when he told one guy that I really liked that if my eyes got any worse I could go blind and that it wasn’t a good idea for me to have children because of the chance of retinal detachments during childbirth in someone whose eyes were as bad as mine. I know he was only telling the truth and he only did that because he loves me so much, but it was a bit upsetting.
Maybe when I earn enough money I can buy myself a new pair of glasses with higher index lenses. I don’t want to ask my dad to spend any more money on glasses for me. I am a working girl now and I should be able to buy my own glasses. My dad has been just wonderful over the years. Anytime I have needed new glasses or contacts he has been right there to buy me whatever I needed.
Sometimes I wonder how my dad got to be such an unlucky man. First of all, his wife left him, and he had to raise a 3 year old girl on his own. Then his little girl became so very nearsighted that she couldn’t see a thing in front of her face without extremely thick and strong glasses that must have cost him a small fortune over the years. But my dad never once complained about how much my bad eyes were costing him. I know I am the luckiest girl in the whole wide world to have such a great, loving super father.
Specs4ever Feb. 2013