The Optician

My mother, always an embarrassment to me, takes me to the Optician. I am thirteen and have recently been unable to see the blackboard at school without squinting. The Optican is kind and friendly but after I fail to read beyond the third line of his wall chart he says it looks as though I am going to need spectacles. This is not good news for me. My life is difficult enough as it is being sickly, undersized (the smallest in my class) and worst of all, cursed with red hair which has made me a target for all sorts of unpleasant nicknames at school. I am already imagining further taunts when I turn up wearing my National Health spectacles.

Back in the waiting-room I am busy with my unhappy thoughts when I hear my mother talking in her familiarly loud and pseudo-posh voice to the Optician who is now at his desk, filling in forms.

Do you think this has anything to do with her being....(she slightly lowers her voice) well, backward? My mother loved to talk about me as though I was invisible. Backward? I hear him repeat. In what respect is your daughter `backward'? He appears confused. Although I am staring at the floor in embarrassment I sense he is looking at me. Well, continues my mother, lowering her voice another notch, she's very slow in some ways. Slow? The Optician sounds surprised. Yes, says my mother, she hasn't um, she isn't really very developed for her age.........I mean she, er, (loud whisper) hasn't started her periods yet. Oh no, I think, why does she do this to me? Not at all, he says, your daughter's short-sightedness is most likely a result of the nasty attack of measles she had recently but she will need to wear her glasses all the time I'm afraid. I can tell by his expression he already knows I have other ideas.

Eventually we are on our way home. What's the matter with you now, my mother says crossly, why do you have to be so contrary (her favourite word). The matter is, I think, you have just publicly humiliated me by telling a strange man that I have not started my periods. In addition to my lack of stature, bad health and red hair I'm apparently also backward and now destined to wear spectacles for the rest of my life. I am never going to have periods, never have a boyfriend, never get married, have children and, worst of all, may never escape from you mother.

Watching her stride ahead, sturdy and big-bosomed (no developmental problems for her) in her unfashionable clothes and sensible shoes I wonder, not for the first time, how can we possibly be related?

I dawdle behind pretending I am not with her.