But I wasn’t fighting the duct anymore. I was fighting the silence of her first cry. The helplessness of watching a nurse wipe away a crust that should have been a tear. I was fighting the idea that my body had built her wrong, had handed her a flaw in her very first plumbing.
Now she’s seven. She cries at everything—sad movies, scraped knees, the death of a goldfish. It pours from both eyes in a ridiculous, glorious flood. Sometimes she catches me watching her, and she laughs. “Why are you looking at my eyes, Mama?” how do you unblock a tear duct
That was the winter of the eye goop. The winter I became a monster of mechanics. I’d heat compresses in the microwave until they were almost too hot to touch, then press them to her closed lid, watching the dried mucus soften and liquefy. I’d hold her arms down with one elbow while my other hand worked the massage, my thumb chafing raw. She learned to hate my touch. She’d turn her face away, press her cheek into the mattress, hide the offending eye. But I wasn’t fighting the duct anymore
The first time my daughter cried, nothing came out. I was fighting the idea that my body
I held her in the recovery room as she thrashed and screamed—and this time, finally, tears gushed from both eyes. A flood of saline and fury. I sobbed with her, equal parts relief and revulsion. I did this to you, I thought. I paid a man to push a wire into your face.
And I realized: she had learned to feel pain without weeping from the broken side. She had simply rerouted. Her body had built a workaround while I was busy trying to demolish the dam.
I knelt in the gravel. I didn’t reach for a warm cloth. I didn’t press my thumb to her nose. I just opened my arms, and she walked into them, and I felt the dampness of her working eye soak into the shoulder of my shirt.