Opting Out of Myopia
Six weeks ago, when I consulted an eye surgeon about my strabismus—a condition exhibited by my right orb turning inward toward my nose, I’d become flustered when he began our interview with a straightforward question: “What took you so long?” he’d asked.
As I fidgeted with my prescription glasses, the kind that high school kids dubbed “coke bottles,” I worried about how lame it would sound to admit to the truth: that for the past ten years, I’d been totally in the dark about the possibility of surgical intervention—one that might have permanently alleviated my problems of general deterioration and double vision once and for all. I felt embarrassed that I hadn’t done the obvious sooner: researched my options and sought this higher level of professional help.
It was this discomfiture that spurred me to finally seek a second opinion, which resulted in my receiving a referral to see him. “I’ve reached a tipping point,” I told the surgeon, “and vanity has ultimately won. I’m more worried about that than I am about being jabbed in the eye.” My misaligned peepers caught his doubled smile then, and twenty minutes later, I walked out of his suite with a date for an ocular tweak.
What I could not have foreseen that day, however, was the way in which, just a few weeks later, I would be confronting another direct query, and once again finding myself scrambling to get at the truth. But this time, the challenge was different, a challenge to another kind of failed vision. It was messaged up into my mind from my unconscious: suddenly, I found my credibility in my daughter’s eyes threatened.
On this particular afternoon, Grace and I had been sitting in her boho-styled living room in Los Angeles, sipping tea—celebrating both my successful surgery and the still-early days of the new year. We’d been gabbing about a troubling documentary on radical religious sects that we’d both recently seen when the room grew unexpectedly quiet. Grace shifted in her chair.
“Hah!” she commented, her voice no longer so animated. “You’re sitting here spouting on about how cults get going by preying on people who are vulnerable, Mom. But what about the time you sent me to that creepy weekend retreat with Sarah? The one during the summer—when I was only sixteen. ”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, both startled and confused. Was she sabotaging me with this “memory,” or was there something more to look at and confront, lying just below the surface?
“How can you not remember?” Grace demanded.
Because my vision had been restored so completely, there was no mistaking her fury. The two of us were now mired in a landscape of emotional pain, revisiting a time when I—both wittingly and unwittingly—had lost sight of my girl.
At the time, Grace had grown increasingly anxious about where my four-year relationship with my significant other, Phil, was headed. Marriage was on the horizon, but I’d held back discussing Grace’s concerns, just as I had argued with her over our tea about the validity of her memories of the retreat. Perhaps she’d chosen to remember this particular time of our lives as a stand-in for the truth: I’d been woefully tone-deaf to her fear about her mother joining her life with another man.
Had she brought up this difficult memory about cults now because it was safely in the past? Later that day, I would ponder something else: If I had been more willing to dig deeper for answers about that precarious time in her life then, rather than being reticent to discuss her fears of abandonment, perhaps I would have been able to see the ghosts in the room now. Instead, I’d been woefully tone-deaf to her needs.
“No, no I asserted. “I do remember the retreat. But I thought then that it was just a fast-track way to do something your grandmother wanted. And which you wanted, too, back then—to be confirmed.” At the time, it had really mattered to both Phil and me that the two of them seemed to be forming a bond. I took a deep breath. “What I’m saying is that I just don’t remember ever pushing you to go.”
But Grace was having none of it, hinting that I’d had an unspoken wish for her to spend time with Phil’s daughter.
“I can’t believe you don’t—or won’t,” she went on with a rapidly darkening expression. “Won’t remember that that place was no run-of-the-mill religious program. It was a cult. And how convenient that not only did they try to suck me into their beliefs and pressure me to accept everything, but they also delegated some fanatic nun I’d never before set eyes on, to enlighten me about Phil—and how you were planning to marry him!”
Wide-eyed and dumbfounded, I stared at my daughter. “That can’t be,” I insisted, getting up from the couch and beginning to pace. “I would never have shared something so important with complete strangers. I stopped pacing and looked at her with my own sort of anger. “I would never have done something like that before talking with you first! I don’t remember it like that—not at all!”
”I’m not going to talk about this with you anymore,” Grace declared. As she gathered our tea cups, I watched a wall rise up between us, a wall that I well knew and which signaled that she had shut down her emotions. Discouraged, I walked out into the kitchen, flooded with memories about how she had spiraled downward into a deep depression not very long after Phil and I married the following summer; and how her connection with Sarah had begun to sour from that point onward. Slowly, I poured the dregs from the pretty china teapot into the sink’s drain.
Later that evening, after Grace and I had shared dinner over a stiff conversation, I returned to the Airbnb where I was staying. My mind was all in a muddle. Then I lay in bed. I felt as if other parenting failures for which I’d already taken responsibility and discussed with Grace many times—and over which I felt genuine remorse—were being relitigated once more. Now it seemed to me that it was happening all over again, but with new and undocumented charges added. The small hours moved on as I raked my memory for discrepancies between the actual “facts” I remembered regarding that retreat and those that Grace had presented to me with such anger.
Not surprisingly, this proved an exercise in futility. Why is it so important for you to be right? an internal voice eventually whispered as I watched the digits on the clock count up. Aren’t you maybe trying to push away the painful memory that you blocked out back then? Maybe you were truly blindsided by Grace’s recollection of a time that must have been frightening to her—feeling trapped at a “retreat” she now sees as a religious indoctrination center. Maybe she was anxious that her Mom was on the verge of moving away from her.
This voice was clearly on a roll. Why can’t you just admit that you became overwhelmed by old feelings of sadness and guilt, and anxiety got the best of you? Tears streamed down my cheek and onto my pillow. But rationalizing everything the kid reported as a misperception on her part? Definitely, not a good look.
Suddenly it seemed as if I’d traded up my thick glasses for an unobstructed sort of vision. I could reach a new perspective on my relationship with my daughter. Not only did I watch my own past clarify itself with lucidity, but I’d been courageous enough to endure a surgery that frightened me. And now I’d used that same improvement in my “vision”—this time an internal one—to better understand Grace and a memory that disturbed her. Once again, I took responsibility in my role as her mother.
I didn’t need to know some objective truth about this particular part of the past that Grace and I shared. I needed only to know Grace’s feelings about what went on at that religious gathering and exercise a willingness to accept whatever her truths might be—to see how they intersected with my own life, and then explore whatever clarity it brought to me.
My defensiveness vanished into the dark. In the quiet of the room, I mentally crafted the apology I would offer Grace the next morning: I would touch upon my regret for the pain caused by all my long-ago mistakes—both those remembered and those also repressed, as well as any that had gone unaddressed between us. I would work against the temptation to protect my self-image at my daughter’s expense. Free from my anxiety, I drifted into sleep.
This morning, I’m still reflecting on my recent quest for an accurate vision with which to examine all this. The question, “What took you so long?” echoes through my mind as I ruminate. I realize now that my answer is entirely different: today, I wouldn’t be embarrassed as I explain both my ignorance and my fears, to either the doctor or my daughter. Today, I would have more compassion for myself and recognize that apologies needn’t stem only from sorrow or shame. Now, each time regret arrives on my doorstep I will welcome the new lesson to be learned and the fresh insight to be gained.
