Glasses Girl

Two days before Thanksgiving, we drove home from a local eyeglasses store, blasting Alvin & the Chipmunks Christmas tunes, with one newly bespectacled little girl in the backseat, a half-smile fixed to her face as she stared out the window in a trance. The world had slid into focus for her, and she was amazed.

I remember the feeling like it was yesterday -- the wonderment over how crystallized everything had become, and also the knot in my stomach over what these ugly new lenses perched on my nose would mean for me.

This time around, it's been my turn to be amazed once again. What I thought would be bittersweet has been anything but.... because unlike my 10 year-old self, Clara, at barely 5, knows down to her toes that it's the girl behind the glasses who matters most of all.

Her self-esteem and sense of self, which once seemed so out of proportion to her age and size, has served her beautifully from the moment her optometrist wrote out her new prescription. From bounding breathlessly into the eyeglass store, to gravely inspecting herself in the mirror as she tried on pair after pair of glasses, to finally, shyly but decisively settling on a perfectly pink pair of frames, there hasn't been a single second of doubt.

These glasses are hers, and there is not a girl in the world who is happier to be wearing them.