I See, Said the Blind Man

Xanthe brought home a vision screening consent form for me to sign.  You would have thought she was going in to take the LSAT with all the worry she went through about returning the form.  "I won't take it back!  My teacher said to bring it home!  What if my teacher says no in French?  I'm supposed to leave it here!  What if the other kids don't have one?  What if I can't find the paper?  (It's the only thing in her backpack.)  What if I forget?  What if I lose it?  What does the paper say?  When do I give it to her?  What if I can't get it out of my backpack?"  Xanthe went so far as to do several drills, wherein she put the paper in her backpack, zipped it, put it on, took it off, unzipped it and got the paper out, brandishing it with a smirk of triumph.  This child rehearsed getting her vision screening form out of her backpack. If I had to guess, I would bet that Xanthe will do fabulously in school, right up until her nervous breakdown, whenever that happens.

To tell you the truth, I had a little anxiety over the vision screening test myself.  For all intents and purposes, Xanthe is blind in her left eye.  I don't want her to come home with a letter from some school nurse that orders me to have her eyes tested.  Yeah, we've done that.  We've done patching, glasses, drops, specialists, the works.  That eye is not going to get better.  Xanthe will fail the screening.  I wrote at the bottom of the form, "Xanthe is blind in her left eye.  Please inform the screener.  Thanks."   The look of dread that clutched Xanthe's face when I casually told her she was going to get her eyes checked at school was enough to remind me of what she's been through.  When she blanched, I rushed to assure her that there were no eyedrops involved, no contacts, no machinery, no doctors.  Just reading letters from far away.

"What if I can't see the letters?  What if I forget what the letter is called?  How far away?  Which letters?  B?  X?  S?  I don't know S.  Who will be there?  Who will help me?"

I will, I wanted to say.  I'll be there.  But I won't.  I just have to hope that some compassionate adult notices the fear in Xanthe's seeing eye and the other eye too, the one that wavers a little bit.  The eye that can barely make out a slightly scary world through a patchwork of shadow.