I have always helped the children in my life understand my blindness by explaining that my eyes don’t work, that they are broken. This may sound harsh, but I’ve found this to be the best and most concrete way to explain things. This is not an easy concept for a three-year-old to grasp, no matter how it’s worded, but it’s the best I’ve yet come up with.
Still, they don’t automatically see this as anything bad. They think it over a moment or two and then we go on with our day. I think it is such a difficult idea to imagine for them at that age, to understand that anything like that can be the case. I am happy to see myself through their eyes for a time.
Was I broken when I was born without perfect eyesight?
Of course not. No baby could or should be called such a thing.
The image that immediately comes to my mind is that of all the poor birds we found on our deck or on the lawn growing up. My mom would bring them in, carrying them delicately in the palm of her hand, and would give them time to see if they could recover. a helpless bird with a broken wing is how I felt a time or two. Sometimes the broken wing spells the end for the bird and sometimes they just need some peaceful and restful recovery time.
My mom would release the bird if this healing were enough. In this simple yet selfless act, she taught me how to heal from the things that might break me.
After all the medical stuff I would endure, I often thought it odd how I never did break a limb. That is one break I have managed to avoid.
I felt the most broken when I became so sick and lost at age eleven.
It broke me the day I lost a loved one, had to hear my oma’s heart break at the words she had lost a grandson, or when I had to tell my own mother her baby brother lost his son/she lost yet another nephew.
It broke me in pieces for a long time after my first experience with love and relationships, as a teenager, when things turned out worse than I ever could have guessed. It kept me from looking for love, for letting it into my life, for many years.
Another piece of myself was broken off when I had to admit I couldn’t handle anymore school because of the pain and I had to take a break from all the stress.
Sometimes we’re left scrambling and searching all around us for our missing pieces, for a long long time.
These things broke off pieces of me and yet love and hope and the most pleasant surprises yet to come helped me put the pieces back together.
Life can be like this sometimes. I feel like a broken person sometimes, when I think of how some might see me, incomplete or whatever. I have lost more eyesight than I was born with, in years gone by, including my left eye now being artificial. Does this leave me broken, not entirely whole?
Whatever that might mean, when something is broken, can it be fixed and even should it?
Any broken part of my physical body or any blow to my spirit, any blow to my heart, I make up for all that by remaining as whole a person as I can be in other ways that matter.
I will take broken eyes over a broken soul anyway. It’s those who are broken in personality are the ones who could most benefit from some repairs.
My eyes may be broken, my heart a time or two, but my personality and my character are in tact and solid. I know that for certain. There is no quick fix, no repair man to call when the soul is irrevocably damaged. I can heal my cracks. They may still exist, but they make the whole of me stronger, in spite of all the breaking there ever was.
This has been a Finish the Sentence Friday post with
Kristi from Finding Ninee
with some thoughts on the things that break us.
Her Headache 
I found this interesting and very moving, but also it tells a lot about you, your strength, perseverance, your character. If only more people were “unbroken” like you, we’d have less turmoil in our lives. Thanks for sharing.
You wrote after all! I was so glad to see that you did and agree completely that while the times we actually are, or feel broken, are so real and right now, and painful and well, broken, it’s different from actually BEING broken. When I was a kid, we had a big bay window and birds used to fly into it all the time. I remember my dad doing the same as your mom, carrying them to heal (or die). At one point, he put net up hoping it’d keep them away but that made it worse because some got caught in the net (same was true for our plum trees). Today, there’s probably better technology but I loved the way you wound the broken birds bit into feeling broken, being too sick for school and having to admit feeling broken, and to never being broken because your heart and soul… this is good my friend. Just tonight we talked to Tucker about strength of character. He doesn’t really get it but posts like yours now remind me that there are so many more aspects to helping him get this. Thank you.