What is your childhood memory that you thought was normal but realized it was traumatic later in your life?

I have terrible, awful vision. I couldn’t see or read the board in classes though I was an average student when I was in school - not that I was in school often because my mom let me stay home a lot of the time. Why? Who knows. I missed chunks of school from starting kindergarten on.

Eventually my math teacher noticed I wasn’t copying anything down from the board and I admitted I couldn’t see it, so she moved me to the front. I still couldn’t see it but I didn’t want to say it to her. I just continued to not copy it until she noticed and moved me out of the rows of chairs to sit directly under the board (which embarrassed me further) but I still couldn’t see it so she noticed again, very worried, then she started using her projector more and giving me the paper afterward to copy at my desk. I was very embarrassed.

Eventually at least a year later I got glasses, I’m guessing because my teachers sent home papers and made my mom get me them finally. At some point they got broken .. and that was that. My mom said, “glasses are expensive, you can only get one pair free from insurance a year so you’ll have to wait now” and I spent the next year without glasses again.

My mom lived in her own form of poverty after being raised in extreme poverty. She’d never had a job, she’d never have money to shell out on glasses and they weren’t an essential to her even if I couldn’t see anything. I remember the first time I saw that stars weren’t blurred light but tiny pinpricks like in the movies, I cried.

/r/AskReddit Thread