Something So Simple

Her first pair of eyeglasses came from Sears. Purple, inscribed with the name Hannah Montana – her favorite TV character at the time. No bigger than a deck of playing cards, they cost two hundred dollars, none of it covered by medical insurance. I put the total on my credit card. I was a single mother at the time, and the amount was exactly one week’s pay from my part-time job as a secretary. When we got home from the store, Angie sat cross-legged on the living room floor, took off her new glasses, and broke them in half. She’d heard the sales lady at Sears say that when little kids don’t like their glasses, they break them.

We went back to the store the next day and bought them again. Later on, when Angie learned how to swim, things got much more complicated.


Swim goggles were invented in 14th century Persia, where divers used tortoise shells polished to near transparency to go searching for pearls. By the 18th century, they’d devised wooden goggles with deeper frames that trapped a layer of air to improve visibility underwater. However, those goggles only worked when the divers looked straight down. As soon as they turned their heads, the air escaped, filling their goggles with water and rendering them useless. They had no choice but to squeeze their eyes tight and float back to the surface.


Seven years after the Hannah Montana glasses, Angie got her first pair of prescription swim goggles. Up until that point, she’d been taking lessons and getting by with the one-size-fits-all goggles sold in the lobby at the pool. But when she made the junior competition team, she needed something stronger to see better underwater. Contacts were not an option since the lenses can absorb pool water and trap bacteria against a swimmer’s eyes.

One day after school, I drove to an optical shop downtown, where Angie picked from the owner’s catalogue. Tony sold a thousand kinds of glasses but only one kind of swim goggle. The singular choice came in the color of the frame: blue or green. Angie asked for blue. Because her prescription was severe, her goggles needed to be custom-made. Give ‘em two weeks, he said, then charged me four hundred dollars.


In 1911, an Englishman named Thomas “Bill” Burgess donned a pair of motorcycle goggles to breaststroke across the English Channel, which he successfully did on his 16th attempt. The goggles were not waterproof, though they did protect his eyes from splashes during the swim, which he completed in twenty-two hours and thirty-five minutes. Fifteen years later, his protégé Gertrude Ederle did him one better by using paraffin to seal her motorcycle goggles and becoming the first woman to freestyle across the channel. She endured fourteen hours and thirty-four minutes of strong waves and jellyfish stings. The press called her “Queen of the Waves.”


Sometimes at swim practice Angie’s coach writes instructions on a white board at the edge of the pool, which of course my daughter can’t see. Sometimes that coach observes Angie not doing what she’s supposed to be doing or talking to the swimmer in the next lane over and assumes she’s goofing around. Really, she’s asking her teammates what the whiteboard says. Sometimes the coach calls her out of the pool and makes her do extra pushups on the hot concrete deck. On those days, she comes home with aching shoulders and bleeding fingers.

I email the coach about my daughter’s vision issues, but that whiteboard always returns. Angie does the pushups anyway, knowing they will only make her stronger.


In 1940, Popular Science magazine printed detailed instructions for readers interested in making their own wooden goggles at home. “With a little care and patience,” the writer explained, “you can construct diving goggles exactly like those used by the spear fishermen of the South Seas and expert Hawaiian divers!”


At a swim competition during the pandemic, when parents were not allowed on deck, Angie’s goggles broke at the start of a relay. She’d already climbed up onto the block and prepared to start her dive when suddenly the nosepiece snapped. The lenses split apart, and the goggles fell around her neck. In a flurry, she tossed them aside and dove in for her portion of the swim – the anchor leg of the 4×50 freestyle relay. She had no choice; her team was counting on her. She swam hard, goggle-less and blinded, her eyes exposed to the harsh chlorinated water. Still, her team took first place. Her eyes stung for the rest of the day, but her smile never wavered.


The first pair of commercialized goggles, which came in only one style and one size, appeared in an advertisement in Slimming World magazine in 1968. Marketed as aids for swim training only, they were not considered for use in competitions. They were for workouts only – for observing strokes underwater and protecting the eyes from irritation. One year later, British inventor Tony Godfrey developed a goggle made of polycarbonate, a plastic known to be thin, lightweight and shatter resistant. Swimmers, including some Olympic hopefuls, began to take notice of “the Godfrey goggle.”


The biggest issue with prescription swim goggles today is design. While other swimmers wear sleek mirrored goggles, Angie’s are clunky, with large eye cups and little to no peripheral vision. For years, we tried goggles from various online manufacturers, shelling out hundreds of dollars each time we found something new. Every pair had its drawback. Either the lenses were blurry, they leaked, or the profile was too high, meaning they created drag in the water. For a competitive swimmer, drag is the enemy.

When we finally found a pair that looked more streamlined, more like the kind her teammates and Olympic heroes were wearing, Angie’s voice cracked. Mom, she said, they look like real goggles! We were driving to swim practice at the time. I had to pull the car over. I thought we were both going to cry.


In the 1970s, Scottish Olympic swimmer David Wilkie broke the British record for the 200-meter breaststroke and won a silver medal at the summer games in Munich, Germany, making him the first person to win an international competition while wearing goggles. After that, every swimmer wanted goggles. When asked, Wilkie said he wore them not to swim faster but because he was allergic to chlorine, which irritated his eyes.


On Wednesdays, I drive Angie to the hospital for vestibular therapy sessions, where a physical trainer named TJ leads her through a series of head and neck exercises that will, maybe, help her get less dizzy in backstroke. Lately at practice, when she’s looking up at the cloudless California sky, her eyes have nothing to focus on. The result is a feeling like motion sickness. She doesn’t get dizzy in freestyle, breaststroke, or butterfly. Only backstroke.

Angie’s new goggles, the ones that resemble the kind her teammates wear, provide a better amount of peripheral vision than her previous pairs. Now she can see the lane lines, which helps her orient her body in the water. They reduce the dizziness, but they don’t eliminate it. Whenever her coach leads the team through backstroke drills, Angie often has to stop at the wall until her lightheadedness subsides.

TJ seems certain his exercises will help Angie retrain her brain’s vestibular system to correctly read the messages her eyes receive while swimming on her back. No, you’re not falling. No, you’re not seasick. Neuroscientists don’t know exactly how the vestibular system works, and TJ says he’s never seen a patient with such a unique case of dizziness. As for me, I doubt he or any of the other trainers know exactly what to do for my daughter, but I keep taking her to the appointments anyway, I keep buying new kinds of goggles anyway, just in case something works. And Angie keeps on swimming. Through the dizziness. Through the obstacles and confusion. Sometimes it takes a lot of ingenuity, a lot of determination and troubleshooting, to do something as simple as see.