“Better you should cry now than I should cry later,” my Grandma Sarah would say to her children.
My mother, the youngest of the eight kids, told me that it wasn’t until she was married and had children of her own that she really understood the impact of her mother’s words.
The same was true for me.
My daughter Sara, Grandma’s namesake, was five years old when we discovered she needed to wear glasses. I tried to make it fun. She picked out her own frames at the optometrist and even showed a bit of enthusiasm. But when she put them on to go to kindergarten, it was a different story.
“I’m not going to wear them,” she said staunchly, looking at herself in the mirror before taking them off and putting them on the dining room table as she dissolved into tears.
“Please, mom. Don’t make me.”
“You have to wear them, honey. There is a problem with your eyes and the glasses can fix it.”
There must have been something resolute in my tone because nothing I have ever told her since has elicited a positive response without a great deal more discussion. Sara sat silently next to me, glasses on, as I drove her to school. She turned away when I knelt to kiss her goodbye. I cried in the car as I drove to work.
“Better she should cry now…” I told myself.
We went through a rough few days. She got teased at school. “My mother made me wear these,” I could imagine her saying with disdain. It took a while, but at some point, she confessed to me that she could read the blackboard so much easier now that her eyes were not crossing.
Years later, her pediatric ophthalmologist told us about eye exercises being offered at UCLA that helped children, like Sara, with strabismus, an eye misalignment condition.
She was reluctant at first. Honestly, so was I. It seemed too good to be true. But if there was even a tiny bit of a chance, I couldn’t imagine not taking it. So twice a week we drove from Pasadena to west Los Angeles so she could give it a try.
And try, she did, including practicing the exercises religiously at home. By the time she reached her teenage years, her beautiful big brown eyes were no longer covered by glasses.
“Better she should cry now…” I thought to myself on the first day she went to high school without her glasses.
On the way home from her eye exercises we would stop for dinner at Brotherton’s family restaurant in Pasadena, a favorite of ours. The waitresses knew her and complimented her on her glasses.
“I’ll have my usual,” she would say, after reading the menu with her new glasses.
“And please save me a dessert.”
They always brought the dessert with our dinner so she didn’t have to worry about them running out. Sadly, the restaurant closed before any of the staff got to see Sara read the menu without her glasses.
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