It wasn’t like birthing a child when your life changes in an instant.

It was more gradual. I couldn’t read street signs at night. I needed to move closer to the front in dance class to learn the steps. I couldn’t make out facial expressions on the television from the couch.

I was relatively young in my twenties, when I thought that personal image still mattered, so I tried to push away the image of Sally Jessy Raphael and scheduled an appointment for an eye exam.

Two weeks after all of the optometry tests with the weird conflicted pirate machinery (“Is this one or that one better?”) I came home and looked at the new me in the mirror.

Yikes -- there was no way I had that many wrinkles. I just looked at myself before picking up my glasses and I did not have that many wrinkles. What did I do, walk through a time warp?

It must be the fluorescent light in this bathroom, and the living room, and even the kitchen where I tried looking into a terrible compact mirror. This was a terrible investment. The only way to not see all of those wrinkles was to take my glasses off.

And so I did.

The lack of precise facial crevices and cracks made me happier.

I wish that it was as easy to remove the drive to perfection that comes with mothering -- like a pair of glasses.

By Jennifer O’Shaughnessy

Labels: age, glasses, Jennifer O'Shaughnessy, wrinkles

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