But for those who do enjoy it, I say: keep reading and enjoy. Humor can help put things into perspective. When I slowly woke up in my hospital bed after the eye removal surgery, my children were sitting next to my bed, talking very quietly to each other. They were telling each other lighthearted stories, and I found that reassuring. I realized that if the surgery hadn’t gone well, they would have been acting differently. The moment I was fully awake and my son realized I was listening in, he made me laugh by saying, “Look, Mom, from now on I’ll just turn a blind eye!”
After the surgery, I had to get used to seeing with just one eye. I would regularly drop things, trip over something, or bump into things. My sweet kids would politely ask if anything was broken and then say something like, “You really should watch where you’re going.” Whenever I knocked over a glass of something, one of the kids would always exclaim, “Well, they’re still just little kids, aren’t they?!” The comment I used to make so often came back to me like a boomerang.
One of the funniest comments was: “Well, now you’re set for a while,” while six new glasses were pointedly placed right in front of me! It turned out that pouring cola into a glass wasn’t as easy as it seemed when we were sitting at an outdoor café. I can still picture the bewildered faces of my children. But it took me a moment to realize why they were looking at me that way: I’d spilled the cola right next to the glass, straight onto the table. The waiter immediately came running over with a napkin. But not a single child came to my defense. On the contrary, with stony faces, they shrugged and told the bewildered waiter, “Yeah, she does that every now and then.” But the waiter looked even more surprised when I was the one laughing the hardest of all!
It takes some getting used to
Over the years, I—and the people around me—have gotten used to the fact that I see with only one eye. Those awkward little mishaps happen much less often now. But that doesn’t mean people don’t play pranks on me anymore. On the contrary! Now it’s mostly wordplay involving “seeing,” “looking,” and “eyes”! Here are a few examples. My son sat down on a chair across from my desk and said in a serious tone: “Mom, can we have a conversation vvvv…” and then, laughing hysterically, “…so, just the three of us?” We never even got around to having a conversation! Recently, during a course, I asked one of my students a rather tricky technical question. The look on his face gave away that he didn’t know the answer. Before I could respond, he suddenly looked at me with a big smile and said, much to my amusement and that of the other students: “Geez, Anita, why are you asking me that difficult question? I thought that as one-eyed people, we should support each other a little…!” It turned out he also wore an eye prosthesis. What a wonderful sense of humor!
One-Eyed Grandma
In front of my children, someone asked how my granddaughters Maan and Lot would refer to their two grandmothers to tell them apart. My son’s answer came astonishingly fast: “Well, that’s really very simple—Mom is just ‘One-Eye Grandma.’” The person who had asked the question, along with the others present, covered their mouths in shock. They didn’t dare laugh until they saw that I was the one having the most fun with the successful joke.
The best eye joke ever…
My son suddenly noticed a spot in his “vision,” and that was a scare. Fortunately, he was able to see an ophthalmologist right away. It turned out there was a sort of air bubble under the retina of his right eye that would go away on its own. He did have to go back a few more times for checkups, though. During those checkups, they had to put drops in his eyes to dilate his pupils, and he hated that because he couldn’t see well for a few hours afterward. His girlfriend said, “It’s not that bad—they do that to your mom too, and she walks home on her own afterward!” Laughing hysterically, he called me to say that he’d just pulled off the best eye-joke-ever by feigning anger and saying, “Yeah, but with her, they only put drops in one eye!”
Anita Hol-Bubeck
