My Hero, My Inspiration, My Brother with Hearing Loss (ONLINE EXCLUSIVE)
“The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.” Don Williams, Jr.
My memories begin with my older brother Barry, who is profoundly deaf. Barry lives in a completely silent world – no hearing aids address the type of deafness he has. Life in a world without sound is a hard thing to imagine if you have never been around deafness – or even if you have. Often when I was little I thought Barry was, without a doubt, faking it. Quietly, I would sneak up behind him and yell out his name. This would make a hearing person jump and maybe even spill their cherry kool-aid on their new white shirt. That never happened with Barry. I can remember emptying ice trays into a bucket right behind him, I expected him to jump and turn around, but he didn’t.
Another time, when we had a horrific hail storm that broke out all of our windows, he didn’t hear anything. My other brother and my mom were holding a board up against the front door and he asked what they were doing. He didn’t realize that the glass door was gone because of hail hitting it. My mother told him that it was raining cats and dogs and he ran to the window, which was not there either, and said, “No it’s not! It is just raining water and ice!”
It wasn’t until Barry went to Texas School for the Deaf that I had the chance to experience silence to a degree. We visited him and had lunch at the school one day. The only sounds we heard were the silverware hitting trays and the occasional excited yelp of someone energetically signing about their day.
Just as it was hard for me to imagine my brother’s deafness; he also had a hard time understanding what it was like to hear. We were riding our bikes one day when Barry asked me to tell him the things that I could hear. I realized that I took for granted the sounds that Barry would never experience. I rode beside him and shared with him what I heard – air conditioners running, birds singing, planes flying across the sky, dogs barking, cars honking their horns, mothers calling their children home and the laughter of children as they played. He was always amazed that I could hear so many things that he could not.
Barry was often frustrated and I recall him losing his temper and throwing tantrums. Our dad wanted to help Barry redirect his frustration, so he gave Barry some tools, wood and hardware. Barry built many different things but the one that I remember best was the butterfly clubhouse. It was a kind of lean-to in the corner of the backyard. It had a dirt floor, so it was like an old-time shack. He nailed up a piece of cardboard for a doorway. We would sit in there in the cool and just talk. One day we noticed caterpillars building their cocoons in our clubhouse – they were hanging all over the ceiling. Then one morning we went in and there were butterflies everywhere. The whole place was filled with fluttering wings. It was the most peaceful feeling.
One of the hardest things for Barry to learn was the sounds of individual letters of the alphabet. My job, as a three year old, was to look through my mom’s magazines to find pictures of the sound we were learning that week. After cutting them out and gluing them into a photo album, Mom wrote the letters below the pictures. At the time, I could tell you where every letter’s sounds came from because we practiced all the time. We would look into the big mirrors on the wall and practice every day – Barry would put his fingers on my throat or my cheek and try to make the same vibration on his own face. This was my first “teaching experience.”
Times were not always grudging for Barry. There were fun moments also. One day we were both in trouble and had been sent to our rooms. These “time-outs” seemed like they would last forever! Our mom was a seamstress and it seemed like she would sew a whole dress while we waited for her to calm down. On one such occasion, Barry and I climbed out of our adjacent windows, ran across the street and hid behind some bushes that went all along the front of the house.
There we were on the cold, damp ground, trying not to sit in anything that might resemble dog poop. We started to silently giggle. When our mom discovered we were not in our rooms, she began yelling out the door for us. Yes, for both of us! “Barry! Teresa! Where are you?” Barry looked at me and started rolling around in the dirt laughing when I told her what she was doing. It was pretty funny. Mom went back in the house and we ran across the street, as stealthily as we could, dodging behind cars and tree trunks. We climbed back in our windows and when she found us in our rooms we got in really big trouble – but it was worth it for the memory.
When I look back on life at home with Barry, sometimes it seems like it was one long teacher training workshop preparing me for my present occupation. Barry and I learned a lot from each other and we learned a lot together. Barry continues to teach me even as we are older and live far from each other. During one recent Christmas visit, Barry spotted my Staples® “Easy” Button and asked me what it said when he pressed it. I signed to him, “That was easy.” After punching it a couple of times and realizing it was the same message over and over, he did not seem to think that it was so cool. He said that repeating yourself is a bad thing. His recommendation: “Keep moving and go on.” So I do with a smile every time I think of my brother, because he is my hero.
Barry is truly my inspiration.
Teresa J. Stanley has been a middle school teacher for many years. She is married and has two daughters and a son-in-law, and is “Momo” to her incredible granddaughter. She has a degree in special education and a Master’s degree in curriculum and instruction. Contact her at teresajstanley@gmail.com.
