My, Granddaughter, What Big Eyes You Have!

My younger sister has had glasses since she was a baby — like ten months old. She’s extremely farsighted, so her glasses make her eyes look much bigger than they really are. She can barely see without her glasses, but her glasses are always somewhat heavy and can get uncomfortable, so despite that, she sometimes takes breaks from wearing them.

When she was little, like three to six years old, she had trouble saying the word “glasses”, so she’d call them her “eyes”. It made sense to me as a seven-year-old since her eyes looked so much smaller when she took her glasses off. This would lead to a lot of funny stares when we went out in public and my sister, who was otherwise quite an eloquent toddler, would announce loudly that she was going to take her eyes off and no one in my family would bat an eye.

As my sister grew up and added the word “glasses” to her vocabulary, most people forgot about the time when she’d tell us she’d taken off her eyes — most people, except for our grandmother.

My sister just finished her freshman year of college. She still wears glasses almost all the time, but she has contacts for special occasions when she’s going out. She tried contacts for a year in high school but found them too uncomfortable to do every day.

My sister started dating for the first time this year. One day, when she was with her boyfriend, she had a massive headache. She suffers from random headaches sometimes, but this was a pretty bad one and the first one she’d had around her boyfriend. She was basically crying because of the pain, so he helped her Facetime our grandma. (She first tried our parents, but both were busy and didn’t answer the phone.)

Our grandma’s first question was:

Grandma: “Did you take your eyes off recently?”

Sister: “No, I’m not wearing my eyes now.”

That was the only part her boyfriend could hear. Her boyfriend was already pretty panicked, and he was so shocked that he started to look up their school’s emergency mental health hotline; he was convinced my sister was going insane or something.

It took my sister about ten minutes to convince him that she was totally fine, which took her mind off the headache for long enough that it went away.