Sight Beyond Eyes
By Wickham Boyle
Lately, I’ve been grocery shopping without my glasses. And I’ve been known to read the stock pages with the newspaper flat on the floor while I perch high up on a chair. Have I bought ricotta cheese thinking it’s low-fat yogurt? Do my teenagers stand on chairs and imitate me? Of course.
This whole eyesight thing has caused me on an afternoon or two to dreamily ponder the pagan goddesses — the crones of old who might lose their sight, but were considered visionaries. I don’t see them wearing glasses. Life without specs, particularly grocery shopping, has become a kind of colorful miasmic adventure. My husband was recently thrilled with the $12 exotic olives I bought — they hiked up his martini grand notches. (I read the price as $2). My kids complain — they know when I’ve shopped without glasses “These are NO FAT Triscuits, they really should say NO TASTE, Ma, you have to wear your glasses when you shop!!!!”
Shop for your own fuckin’ groceries, darlings, I want to say, like a foul-mouthed salty almost-grandmother. But they’ve asked me to curtail my swearing. So instead of profanity I inquire if they can find anything worth eating in the $300 worth of food I bought. You have to be tough to be a menopausal mom with teenage kids; it’s a very difficult mix. There is, in fact, little time for reverie about goddesses and magic. Just when the teens are at their most petulant, edgy, and hormonal, you are too. Really, toughness isn’t the issue; flexibility and humor can be the salve that turns frustration and anger into insight.
Maybe this idea of dimming sight is about opening up to unseen adventure. I’ve always been on top of every detail, perhaps a little too into micro-management for my family, and now I get to be looser around the edges. Not seeing certain details offers a little mystery and fun.
Besides, it seems that with glasses I see things I am not ready for. Without them, this in-between place I am in at age 53 is less glaring. Sans glasses, in softened sight, the details of my changing self, the lines between youth and old age, which pick at me unmercifully, are hazy and distant. My dimming eyesight helps me to see the marks of time with no edginess, like the time of day when the light makes everything blend into violet, not gray.
There’s something about not being able to see all the damn details that makes life a little more fabulous and eccentric. It is, actually, a whole new perspective.
I am a woman usually content with the augmented wisdom or spiritual milestones that occur as time proceeds. I have always had a kind of feminist pride. I was an early woman at Yale when women were not so much being thought of as equals but as cute accessories. My mother was a product of those original crucibles of feminism, the Seven Sisters Schools. She went to Wellesley and believed that women secretly ruled the world and just didn’t have the heart to tell the men. We read Betty Friedan, who I was told went to Smith but we shouldn’t hold that against her; and Gloria Steinem, whose blonde tresses, I was admonished, shouldn’t be held against her. My mother was a funny feminist. So from this background I believed I would be be okay with growing older. My mother taught me that women who surgically implanted youth were superficial because they didn’t embrace reality.
I attempted to subscribe to that belief until recently. I was on a trip to Hawaii, and in the hotel bathroom there was a mirror – and, worse, one of those magnifying mirrors with mini-klieg lights. Looking in it, I saw every expanding pore, new wrinkle, errant hair, and cute freckles turning into age spots; all enlarged times 10. I was flabbergasted. This was not a fabulous adventure. In fact it hit me: I am incontrovertibly no longer young.
Those mirrors should be banned, and nobody should have to pluck or wax their eyebrows, ever. They call them “beauty mirrors.” Why? All I could see were flaws: the lines beginning around my lips, and I have never smoked; the discoloration on my cheeks from years of less than vigilant sunscreen usage during time spent biking, swimming, running, and falling in the grass with nothing between me and the air but sweat. The skin around my eyes, I could see, had begun to take on the quality my mother used to call “crèpe-y” — the party decoration paper used in the ’50s that had a kind of thick transparency to it. “Crèpe-y” was always a negative in her parlance, as was someone who was “long in the tooth.” I never understood that phrase until I began to notice that the teeth of my older friends did seem more exposed; then I remembered her phrase.
Now why would I want to look at all of that up-close and in detail?
My mother always hated women who comported themselves in a manner she termed “too gamine” for their age. My mother knew style, she wore Chanel suits, either real ones bought in Paris or her own knock-offs, whipped up in her sewing room. She had carnelian lips and smelled of Norell and Lark cigarettes, she was a radiant beauty whose brain was under-utilized, but she instructed her children constantly, imparting her philosophy. Other faux pas for older women was hair worn too long or clothes too tight or revealing. “No one,” she used to say, “certainly no man, wants to look at a wrinkled décolletage.” I look at mine and shrink because, yes, it is changing, and still I insist on a hint of lace peeking out of my husband’s Brooks Brother’s shirt, which I often wear over jeans. At this point in my life I want to take the chance to confidently flaunt a little without being threatening.
I firmly believe spiritual strength should offer us our own sense of confident beauty despite the physical changes. Or do I? That chance encounter with the mirror in Hawaii was the first time I saw the indisputable appearance of the crone – the woman of legend and myth who is revered for her wisdom, not her youthful body.
The difficulty lay in the fact that the crone had begun to appear on my face physically, before I was ready for her psychologically. She was hurrying me to get right with the physical changes. Because as far as I was concerned, let’s face it, I still felt I looked as if I were 17 — well, anyway, like a woman in her 30s.
I came home from that Hawaiian trip and looked at the photos of me when I was younger, leaning on a pony in Wyoming or resting my elbow on my thigh at the Spoleto Festival in Italy. I saw a gorgeous young woman whom I knew (because she was me) had been out of synch with her self. I had so doubted my gifts, my value, and my abilities because I was never the traditionally treasured beauty. I was dark, I was not thin, and I was always a mouthy tomboy. I was raised to believe that “pretty is as pretty does.” I remembered thinking that if I was not pretty; I was going to “do:” be bright, do good works, get a big education, cook, think, read, offer things to others. How tragic, when today I look at those photos and think, as I do about my daughter: God, that girl was a vital beauty. I see my beauty in those photos, and certainly I can reflect back on being adored by strings of men and rarely being without a lover, but I felt always that it was not my beauty that drew them but the fact that I was a good sport. When I look back I see the curves, the long shiny wall of hair, the flashing eyes, flawless skin, and I think: “I missed it.”
In short, once again, I find I am in jeopardy of missing it. I have such trouble viewing me softly — because I am, after all, still in my own body and can feel a loss of the immediate tone that we all sigh at in young women. They all seem like vigorous rubber bands, while I feel held together by a less resistant tug. Vigilant scrutiny is exhausting.
Now that I am in this place, the one called by some cultures “woman between winds,” I see that in youth I ignored the truth of my body, and now in aging my body is ignoring the truths of my wisdom. It is a moment of revelation, and I realize I will not make the same mistaken judgment about myself twice.
The crone was the woman in between winds who was no longer blown over by the occurrences of nature. She stood solid before any storm, like an aged tree. Part of her solidity, her rootedness, came from a sense of self. In beginning to really survey all of me, I notice my own wisdom appearing between the grays and wrinkles.
How divinely ordained it is, in certain aspects, that our eyesight diminishes first, because it is with the inability to inspect myself up close that I can overlook all those physical signs of aging my mirror wants to give me.
When I embrace the slightly out-of-focus edges I feel less angry, less frustrated, happier, more hopeful. With this softened vision, lines, marks, and the hostilities of time melt away. Not just for me, but also on everyone I see. When my adolescent kids bemoan their pimples and imperfections all I can think is this is a canvas of unmarred beauty; when my husband talks about the gray in his beard, to me it appears that he has such a distinguished square chin made softer by a few glowing highlights.
I think for now, despite the fact that I have about four pairs of glasses tucked in “don’t forget them” places, I will continue to not wear them and intrepidly pursue my shopping adventures. And I vow, I will never, ever get one of those “beauty” mirrors. What would I gain? Clarity? Well that’s all relative. What I have is surprise, softness, and a sense of forgiveness — maybe even insight. My eyes may be dimming, but my vision and intuition seem to be deepening.
Midlife Eyesight
Facts Up Close:
The following is an interview with Dr. Susan Margolis, opthamologist specializing in cornea and lazer treatments, clinical instructor at New York University.
Don’t expect pity or high drama from Dr. Susan Margolis. She’s a doctor, after all, Her attitude: “Take care of the changes and move forward.” How refreshingly female.
“The body begins to change after 40,” says Margolis. “Muscles get stiffer, lose flexibility, lubrication, why would the muscles in the eyes be any different? They’re not.”
She explains that as the lens of the eye begins to age it slows down when making distance adjustments, whether close or far. The lens relaxes to see up close, contracts to see distance. “These contractions and expansions just don’t move as quickly any more. It’s simply a muscular condition.” The bad news is that there really is nothing you can do about it. The good news is that Margolis’s recommendations are frankly stylish and, even better, inexpensive. Toss all the negatives you’ve heard about the cheapy magnifying glasses you see in the major drug and grocery stores and buy yourself a few fabulous pairs to keep in pockets, the car, purses, by the bed.
“All you need when your nearsightedness begins to go is a pair of magnifiers,” says Margolis. These are meant for such activities as shopping, reading, plucking, removing splinters. According to Margolis they do the trick. “Try a few different strengths out first, they’re usually only about $6, so why not. If you get a headache, experiment with a lower magnifier until you find the right one, and don’t wear them for distance seeing. These are meant to be taken on and off, which is why you don’t want to spend a lot. Also get yourself some changeable chains so you can hang the glasses around your neck.”
Also, after 40, there is the small issue of, er, dryness. Not only does this affect the obvious — sexual lubrication — but the eyes as well. Margolis explains that hormonal fluctuations (estrogen decrease) can cause dry, irritated, red eyes, and blurred vision. “The tear ducts and glands around the eyes are producing fewer tears. The blurred vision is not about sight, it’s about lack of wetness. This can actually be painful.” While there are over-the-counter eye drops, Margolis doesn’t recommend them. She suggests a new prescription drop called Restasis. Used twice daily as prescribed, Restasis relubricates the eyes, replenishing liquid, and is an anti-inflammatory.
These ocular conditions, says Margolis, will persist through your 40s and 50s, and then level out around age 65. The good eye doctor, however, is not a big proponent of rushing to get new prescriptions every time the old glasses don’t seem strong enough (which will be many times). Instead, she advises women to hang back on getting stronger prescriptions. “Once you up the eyeglass strength you can’t go back, the eyes adjust. I suggest women get check-ups no more than every two years.”
Basic remedies will work wonders, says Margolis. Brighten the lights when you are reading, but dim them when you want to rest the eyes. “Just stop using your eyes for moments during the day. Stop reading, stop watching. Stop doing. Maybe even take a little nap.” What a concept — do less, see more. Gg
