Mom, Now You’re Making Me Cry!

Some days I can handle my daughter’s loss of vision.   No, most days I can handle it; I can cope with the sadness and loss and frustration and worry—and then there are those few days when something happens that brings into focus just how severe her vision impairment is and I fall apart.  

If you’re thinking today was one of those days, you’d be close—it was yesterday.   We manage well at home and in familiar environments.   My daughter knows her environment well and can fool even all but the most observant of people into thinking she has more vision than she actually does.   She fools us, or perhaps we’re fooling ourselves, into seeing more than she’s seeing.

But take my child out of known environments and things can easily change from hopeful and positive into a reality check of how she functions in an unknown area.    Yesterday was one of those days.    We were walking home from a park and I was so happy my daughter had paid attention to the change in pavement color and hadn’t walked out into the street before listening for cars and waiting for us.   Then, she did a great job of seeing the yellow curb to step up onto the sidewalk.   As I was raising my hands to clap and praise her for seeing the curb, WHAM, she slammed her forehead into the stop sign post.

She was upset, but since I didn’t get overly worried, she recovered quickly and wanted to be put back down to walk.   We got home and about an hour later I saw my daughter with a cut on her face and blood across her cheek.    This was minor, but another bump from something she didn’t see.    Then, she couldn’t tell the grill tray was rotated out and in the line of the stairs and could have hit both her face and fallen down if things had gone differently.   Also, did she get close to touching the hot gas grill?   I couldn’t get information on that one, I think not, I think she could feel the heat, but she was figuring out where it was from what I could tell.

Three times my daughter ran into things—on her face and head in just a few hours.    Three times she needed an adult or someone else to help her navigate her world.    She is learning cane work, which will be the tool she needs (along with her hearing) to move through an environment independently and successfully, but she’s not there yet.   I want her to be able to see—at least enough to be safe.

I went into my room and broke down crying.   My daughter came in to find me a minute later.   I picked her up and she asked me why I was crying?   I told her I was sorry she hurt herself running into the pole today and that we always try to keep her safe.   I explained I was sad because I didn’t want her to be hurt.   Here’s the thing—my daughter was fine about the whole bump on the pole thing and the scratch on the face and the gas grill incident—but when she saw me crying, she immediately starting crying and said, “Mom, now you’re making me cry!”  

So I did what any parent would do in that situation, I pulled it together and told my daughter it was time to go do something fun and did she want to come with me?   Stopping crying, she said yes.

The Big Boy Update:  For no particular reason or discernible connection, my son said to Uncle Eric at breakfast. “the only metal that I like is elastic metal…and that’s it.”  It is now dinner time and to establish the veracity of this statement I just asked my son, “what is your favorite type of metal?”   Without pause he responded, “elastic”.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   Today’s post wasn’t a particularly hopeful or positive one about my daughter’s vision.    I try to keep a positive attitude but I don’t succeed every day.   That doesn’t mean we’ve lost hope or that all hope is lost.