When You Don’t Tell

This blindness thing with my daughter is a topic of conversation that can’t really be avoided.   That’s okay, i’m not complaining, it’s one of those topics that people want to know about.   If someone is aware of what’s happened but they haven’t seen us in a while they want to ask in all hopefulness how things are going.   People want to hear good news.  If the person hadn’t heard about my daughter’s sudden vision loss they are concerned and interested and want to know the story.   In either case, I don’t mind talking about it.   But sometimes it’s tiring telling the sad story with the unknown ultimate outcome.

There is a third option I’ve discovered: not mentioning anything at all.    I’ve gone to birthday parties with my daughter and not said anything to parents who didn’t know.   My daughter needs some extra help sometimes, but different children need different amounts of help.   Maybe she comes off as not paying attention or a little bit slower than other children her age, but there is so much variability in children’s development you can get away with saying nothing almost all the time. 

The last birthday party was at an indoor playground.   My daughter didn’t know who she was playing with a lot of the time unless we told her or she heard their voice.   I intentionally said nothing to any of the parents and no one came up to me and asked if she was okay.    

To me though, it’s shockingly obvious.   Her eyes are blown wide open with fully dilated pupils (or in her case, permanently scarred pupils).   She stares blankly and doesn’t visually track like a sighted person does and her eyes don’t always work the same when she’s trying to see something from an angle that she’s still able to gain some information from.    But people don’t remember what she used to be like.   Sometimes, I’m afraid I’m going to forget what she used to look like as a normally sighted child. 

Hopefully next month’s surgery will give her some vision back and we’ll be on a path to more sight and more normally function eyes for her.   For now, I just let her be her happy self and remember to be happy that she has enough sight that people don’t realize what her visual capability really is. 

The Big Boy Update:  I got in trouble with my son yesterday morning.   He was looking at the door to our deck, which isn’t accessible from the ground.    He told me, “mom, if someone had a grappling hook they could have come up here and taken our stuff, you left the door unlocked.”  I told him he was right and we’d better be more careful in the future. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We took our children to Dave and Busters last week.   It’s got a lot of electronic games and lots of huge lights and colors all in a dark environment.    As we were walking around my daughter told me, “I love the colors.   I love all of the colors in the world.”