When Your Baby Needs Glasses

As a pregnant mother, you have dreams and fantasies about your unborn child. First and foremost, a mother hopes to give birth to a healthy baby, that is a given. But every mother also has ideas and ideals of how her child will look. You wish that she will get your mom’s green eyes, pray that he will not get your dad’s nose and, let’s be real, you secretly hope that your kid looks like you (or at least your side of the family).

Unless there is a strong family history or some other extenuating factor, it probably doesn’t cross your mind to wonder if your baby will have to get glasses. But, it happens. The rational, sensible, adult part of you will accept the diagnosis with a smile, maybe even making a joke, but really, every part of your insides will be screaming, “No! I don’t want them! Not my baby!”

It’s not that you don’t have perspective; you realize that this diagnosis is a relative nothing in the scheme of things. You are, in many ways, so lucky. But glasses will, undoubtedly, present your child with a tiny challenge, maybe only making life 1% more difficult for her, but that is 1% more than what you are comfortable with.

You can be the most tolerant person, believing and preaching that all people are equal on the inside, no matter how they look or in what they believe—and you can still hate it when you see your gorgeous child in nerdy, wire frames.

Here’s the deep, dark truth that is so hard to admit: I wish that my kids did not have glasses.

Part of that feeling is because my daughter has to get prescription goggles in order to swim and my son loses his glasses every three days. But, really, if I am being completely honest, it is mostly because I don’t like how their precious, perfect faces are obscured by even the most discreet frames.

And then there’s what we hear from strangers on a daily basis. For a mother, the idea of anyone saying something hurtful to your child is painful, but when the comment has to do with something about which you are already insecure, it feels like you’ve been walloped in the gut.

So, do I love that my kids have to wear glasses? No. Have I accepted it? Yes. I have accepted their extremely farsighted little eyes. All eight of them.

Related post: Things You Don’t Really Know About Kids Until You Have Kids