We\u2019d been noticing the signs for a while. Well, that\u2019s not quite accurate; we\u2019d seen them, but had managed not to notice them at all. Her tendency to tilt her head when watching films, her regular practice of rubbing her eyes, her occasional complaints of headaches and light aversion. It was only when she started covering her left eye with one gummy little hand that something closer to noticing began to happen.<\/p>\n
A trip to the optician proved the case beyond doubt, giving our three-year-old daughter a diagnosis of lazy eye, and the strongest possible prescription for a child her age. Kindly staff repeatedly congratulated us on catching this so early, speaking as if they would soon be nominating us for a humanitarian award. My wife and I felt only shame, casting our minds back through telltale warnings we\u2019d missed or, worse, dismissed out of hand.<\/p>\n
Soon, however, her glasses were ready for collection \u2013 a bright pink pair she\u2019d chosen herself on the day. Compared to the jam-jars I was used to seeing on kids in childhood, hers are positively chic; slim and contoured, in the manner of the specs worn by a feisty but intellectual professor in a streaming-only romcom. <\/p>\n
She\u2019s taken to them with relish, vigilantly keeping them on at all times, and adorably fastidious in their upkeep. Watching her judiciously clean the lenses with her little cloth multiple times a day, it\u2019s clear that part of the joy she takes in her glasses is in having things of her own and being granted responsibility to maintain them. But I can\u2019t entirely dismiss the sense that a greater part of her joy is finally being able to see properly, after God knows how many months of seeing the world around her descend into a murky blur.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s only when you look at her head-on that the scale of her prescription is remotely apparent. Her eyes are magnified to anime proportions, zoomed in so close that her whites are barely visible, her pupils the size of bath plugs. Her eye doctors told us in grave tones that, had we not caught her condition within a year or two, it\u2019s likely she\u2019d have had trouble reading for the rest of her life. Looking at her today, happy and proud with two sniper scopes permanently fixed to her face, I\u2019m fairly confident she can now read the livery of passing satellites.<\/p>\n
Does it matter that she also looks adorable? I\u2019ve asked myself this a lot. I\u2019ve never worn glasses, but had certainly never presumed I\u2019d internalised any sense of stigma around them. Even as kids, I baulked at my parents\u2019 generation repeating the things they\u2019d been taught in the 1950s and 1960s, the \u201cboys seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses\u201d genre of jaunty rhymes designed to destroy the self-worth of bespectacled women. But, even in my day, terms such as \u201cspeccy\u201d and \u201cfour-eyes\u201d \u2013 and, ingeniously, \u201cspeccy-four-eyes\u201d \u2013 were common schoolyard insults. More broadly, the association between visual impairment and nerdiness was so complete that glasses were inevitable shorthand for any socially awkward boffin in any film, comic or TV show. <\/p>\n
Remnants of this still remain, of course, as a brief search for the word \u201cnerd\u201d in your library of emojis will attest. Deep into my teens, there was a near-inescapable genre of films in which very obviously beautiful girls were only revealed to be beautiful once they took off their glasses and wowed everyone at prom. All of which elides the most jarring act of tactical nerd-face in the western canon \u2013 the single pair of glasses that has, for nine decades now, stopped people from realising that Superman and Clark Kent are the only two men in Metropolis who have blue hair.<\/p>\n