MEMOIR

When the Blessed Virgin Wore Glasses
By Mary J. Breen

When I was in grade two in the early ‘50s, my first job every morning was to push my wooden desk right up against the chalk ledge. There I would sit by myself all day long, craning my neck back and forth trying to figure out what was written there high above me. When I told my parents about this arrangement, they heard it as further proof that, sad to say, their only child “born in their forties” was slow-witted. Never mind that I had been able to read for years. Never mind that I had memorized the keys on an unmarked typewriter. My being separated from the other kids confirmed their worst suspicions. After all, I seemed to be baffled by even ordinary little things like spotting the bunnies and butterflies they pointed out to me from the car.

And then there was my clumsiness, my never-healed scabby knees, bruised elbows, scraped chins, the slash across my neck from a guy wire at the tennis courts that made it look as if someone had tried to slit my throat. I’d even spoiled my First Communion photo. There I am in my white dress and white gloves and white stockings and white shoes and white veil, my chin covered with white gauze held on with adhesive tape because I’d gone over my tricycle handlebars the day before. Evidence was mounting that little Mary was a bit dim. And, she squinted too much.

One day near the end of the school year, a girl in my class arrived wearing glasses. Rita. I’ll never forget her. Something compelled me to want to try them on. We went into the washroom where I wouldn’t get caught risking my eyesight by looking through someone else’s glasses, something adults were forever talking about. I put them on, and for the first time I could see the expression on Rita’s face, the individual tiles on the bathroom floor, and the sign by the door that said, “For good hygiene, wash your hands.” I looked in the mirror and saw myself smiling back. How I hated having to return those glasses. Right after school I rushed home to tell my mother about my discovery.

She said I was being foolish; she had excellent eyesight and my father only needed glasses to read, therefore there was nothing wrong with my eyes. However, I persisted, and finally that summer she took me to a specialist in Toronto. And I was right. I was near-sighted.

So, I got my first glasses — heavy glass lenses set in flesh-coloured plastic frames. I remember being in the car with my mother in downtown Toronto that evening. “Look,” I kept saying, “they’re words!” The blur of pink and yellow, red and blue lights had now separated and become distinct, and they proclaimed things like restaurant names, movie titles, Coca-Cola even!

My mother then set out to convince me that glasses were not a stigma. Perhaps she was trying to make up for not having realized my deficiency, but this was unusual behavior for her as she was not prone to remorse since, in her mind, she was not prone to error. Before long she had taken a holy card of the Blessed Virgin, a traditional picture of Mary in a long blue gown looking down from heaven, and used her fountain pen to draw a pair of big blue-framed glasses on the Blessed Virgin’s face. My father said it was a sacrilege, but my mother didn’t back down. She said she wanted me to feel that the best Mary of them all wore glasses herself sometimes.

Problem was I didn’t care. I was much too young to need consoling about the loss of my erstwhile beauty. All I knew was that I was now a much better second-base player, my scabby knees were healing over, and my desk was back in line with the rest of the kids. I could even tell the good guys from the bad at the movies.

Of course, by the time I was in high school, I had come to hate my thick glasses. I knew they made my eyes look smaller and part of my head look narrower, and I’d had lots of experience with how easily they could break during baseball and basketball games. I’d also heard the one about girls who wear glasses. So, after my first year at university, despite my mother’s protests, I spent my entire summer’s earnings on those wonderful new things called contact lenses. And now, all these years later, I’ve had cataract surgery, and I still can’t get over the fact that when I wake up in the morning, I can see the leaves on the trees and read the books by my bed without lenses of any kind.

I suspect that I remember those early years so well because there, already well-established, was the pattern of our days: my mother not seeing what was really wrong with me, then trying to make me feel better about something I didn’t feel bad about, never noticing what really did worry me — never seeing who I was.