Day 27- Lost and Found

I guess the story of our lost kid is in order...
I was not only traumatized by the incident at the nursery, but when we went to the mall one time... and this is utterly embarrassing...  my daughter got lost. We were with my sister's kids, and my husbands two kids from a previous marriage... this is all such a long story, but to condense it down... we had 6 kids, all of stair-step ages... the two older girls, just months apart, looked like twins, the boys, just months apart, looked like they were brothers, not twins, but maybe a year apart in looks... and the two little girls, were two years apart, and looked like sisters... I was not that old, maybe 23? My husband was 33 or 34? Everyone looked at him like he was a dirty old man.... and he was... but all the kids weren't ours... but they looked it... Anyway, I always had them go together as buddies, and trusted the older kids to pay attention to the younger ones... which in your own family, you can do... when it is someone else's kids, not so much. They don't really pay attention do they? We went to eat and then to the mall and were fine, I was keeping watch over them all I thought, I would stop and count... we were fine... until the pet shop. Yes, they still had pet shops in the mall at that point. The older kids were looking at the dogs, the younger at the rats and my baby girl, then about 3? just disappeared. I turned to count kids and she was missing. I panicked, thinking back to the nursery, not able to fathom how I would find her in the mall...

We stopped a guard, told him, I started running around like a crazy woman... I turned a corner to find a woman with my daughter in her arms... my daughter was fine until she saw me... started crying and holding out her arms... and I knew right then that I could never let her further away from me than an arms length. I could tell it was her, because she had on a bright pink dress and jacket, her hair already turning a beautiful blond, and her round, sweet face... but that woman could have easily had her in a car and gone in an instant... I panicked, I cried, I was relieved, and mortified all at once. If I had not been so quick to run around I don't know if I would have found her. I was hurt that my husband wasn't worried in the least. He didn't see her, but I felt like it was because I couldn't see that she got lost. Why was that? Was it the guilt in 'losing' her at the nursery? Was it just a feeling of inadequacy on my part? Was it the truth in the fact that I couldn't see and shouldn't be in charge of kids?

I worried over this for a long time, then when it was time for school... and things went smoothly, I was so happy,

Years later, I found that my daughter didn't know that I was so blind. That I had so much trouble seeing all those years. She herself had to go into glasses during third grade. When I started homeschooling her... I found out that she had 'failed' two of the school exams... and they hadn't notified me, which is a whole other story....  She went into contacts at 11, the same as me... Her eyesight, like mine, got worse and worse over the years, not at the fast pace that mine did, but it did decrease at a rate that was not good. She knew cataracts were a huge problem with me, but didn't know that I was having so many other problems... When she had an exam as an adult, she had to call me so that I could talk to the doctor... and tell him about my eyes... all the trouble I had and was going through at this point... She said that she didn't know that I had so much trouble... and now she is going through some of the same things as me. The floaters, the wet macular degeneration, the probability of going blind at an early age...

I didn't want anyone to know that I had such a hard time seeing, especially my daughter and her friends. I drove like I had no problems, and mostly my vision was correctable to 20/60 and 20/80... most of the time, a couple of times it was even better... not for long mind you, but it did get better and get worse over and over... so I drove, played ball with the neighborhood kids, went camping, canoeing, to museums, to exhibits... anything and everything that I could... I did with my daughter.. She knew I had one large floater, but I guess in her mind it was an oddity, and she didn't think about it until she was in the doctor's office that day.... and tried to tell him about it...she really didn't remember much. So they called... it worried her doctor that I had so much trouble with my eyes... that the doctors had never really found out what was wrong with them, no explanation as to why I had so many problems...