This afternoon, I will take my son to the optician to pick up his first pair of glasses. He is entirely unfazed by this new chapter. I, on the other hand, am a mess.
Between the ages of five and 36 (at which point, fed up with sticky toddler fingerprints smeared across my glasses, I had laser treatment), I was wildly shortsighted. So shortsighted that, even with the thinnest available lenses, I still looked like a boy with a pair of jam jars strapped to his face. And while there is obviously nothing wrong with wearing glasses, I am acutely aware of the effect they can have on a young person.
There is a chance that my son’s next few years will involve constantly lending his glasses to his classmates so they can put them on and laugh at how weird they feel. Or taking them off to go swimming, transforming every pool into a blurry screaming nightmare. He will have to relearn how to head a football. He will eventually have to learn to kiss people without getting smudged. And then, 25 years from now, he will attend the Guardian Christmas telethon after getting an infection from a dirty contact lens, and his giant weepy eye will visibly distress the esteemed columnist sitting opposite him. There is a chance that I may be projecting that last one a bit.
He will also be forced to decide how best to demonstrate his personality to the world. Those with perfect eyesight will struggle to understand this, but the message you send about yourself if you wear a pair of stern-looking, frameless Sven-Göran Erikssons is vastly different from what you send if you go out looking like Timmy Mallett. That’s a big choice to make at any time, let alone pre-puberty.
Clearly, I am overthinking this. He is going to be fine. My first pair of glasses, chosen in a fog of embarrassment, were designed to make me as invisible as possible. I’ve already had to talk him down from a livid-green pair of Prue Leith whoppers. I wore my glasses timidly and reluctantly, but he is far happier to make a spectacle of himself. Good for him.
