Remember, Mom, I Don’t See Very Well

“Remember, mom, I don’t see very well” was something my daughter said to me one day a while back.   It was one of those times where you realize other people, namely my daughter, are handling things better than I am.  

As a parent, I desperately want things to improve, for progress to be made, for her to be able to see better.   One of the ways I manage my expectations is by constantly testing her.   I’m not overtly testing her, but instead, take any opportunity that circumstances may present to ask her a question such as, “do you see the yellow truck passing us?”   Since my daughter isn’t interested in giving us updates—can’t give us updates really—on the current state of her vision, I try to gather information whenever I can.   Ultimately though, I’m testing her and in so doing, I might be frustrating her.

We were doing something, I don’t remember what it was now, but I asked her if she could see something that I thought she might be able to see.   We think, but aren’t sure, that her far vision is improving in the right eye.    When I asked her, my daughter calmly said, “remember, mom, I don’t see very well.”  I told her that was okay, there were other ways to find out about the thing we were doing.

It’s a fine line, testing versus not pressing her.   We need to know how things are going because her doctors need that information when we see them to help with their plan going forward.   I think my husband does a better job of leaving it alone and letting her behavior tell us things than I do.   But then again, he’s a much more patient person than I am.

The Big Boy Update:  Tonight at dinner my son called to me and told me, “look, I’m folding this over”.   I was confused at what he was doing and why he was folding the corner of his paper place mat over.   We were at an Italian restaurant and he pointed to a picture of the colosseum on the page and said, “I want to go there”.    It was then that I realized I’d shown him how to dog ear pages in a catalog to mark the things you like so you could go back to them later.   Of particular note, the catalog was at the hair cutting place while he was waiting to get his hair cut.   The catalog was of ladies clothing.   He was marking pages with shirts he thought I would look “beautiful” in.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter saw her play therapist today.   They have been working on making plans together.   She’s been teaching my daughter how to plan out things because in some cases, specifically with a visual impairment, planning out how you’re going to accomplish something is an important skill to have.   She said my daughter is liking very much to make plans and tell her all about what she is going to do to get a certain difficult job done.