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| Jay Waters |
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I found myself stalking the deaf man in the produce section again. I tried to do it casually, making several nonchalant passes to scrutinize some exotic fruit or member of the squash family that looked as if it were suffering some sort of communicable outbreak. The man stocked his shelves warily, glancing occasionally at me as I thumped, sniffed and performed other appropriate inspections on various produce. I had no idea what I was doing, of course, just as I had been clueless the fi rst time I had encountered the man almost four years ago.
I had been on a mission to find fennel—an absurd quest for someone who rarely ventured beyond Hamburger Helper in her cooking repertoire. Since I had no idea what a fennel looked like, I approached the man working the produce section and politely asked him if they stocked the mysterious item. He immediately shook his head and pointed at his ears, then made the universal shrugging sign for “I don’t understand.” It was my first encounter with a deaf person, and to be honest, I did not handle it well. Rather than attempt to communicate in some other way, I simply mumbled a clumsy apology and moved on.
A few months later, my son was diagnosed with a hearing impairment.
I cringed in shame every time I thought of how dismissive I had been to that man in the grocery store. I realized that my own son would face the same kind of exclusion and ignorance in his future. I had no idea how to be the mother of a specialneeds child. I barely had a grasp of what it meant to be a first-time mother, period. I had never known anyone who was deaf and, to be honest, had never really given people with hearing loss much thought. They were an invisible part of our society, not as noticeable as a person in a wheelchair or someone who is blind. You could literally walk past them every day and be none the wiser. I knew nothing about the disability, like the fact that there are varying degrees of impairment. I thought it was all or nothing, you either heard or you didn’t. I had no idea what Hertz meant or the difference between high- and low-frequency sounds. That’s why my son’s hearing problems didn’t get diagnosed until he was four years old – he could obviously hear and respond to noises. It was a revelation to me that my son was hard of hearing. The term brought to mind images of cantankerous old men who held big coneshaped apparatus to their ears and yelled, “Eh? What’s that, Sonny?”
Everyone thought that my son just had a speech delay. He spoke, but not as clearly or with as large a vocabulary as his peers. For years I had listened as people, even doctors, assured me that boys talk later than girls, and they knew so-and-so with a child who never spoke a word and then “poof!” – suddenly one day after he turned three, he began to talk nonstop and was now one of the brightest children in his class. My son was born the year newborn hearing screening was just beginning to be implemented on a wide scale in hospitals. He did not receive a screening and it never occurred to me, worry-monger that I was, to ask for one. Add that to the mountain of guilt that I already hoarded.
Ah guilt, that one-size-fi ts-all cloak all mothers wrap themselves in. It knows no barriers – race, class or otherwise – and drives us to do all manner of things we normally would never do while not under the infl uence. And as if I didn’t already carry around my own lion’s share of guilt, now I felt bad about my inability to To compensate, I tried to educate myself on the subject by reading as much as I could on the Internet and in books, of which I found few. Looking on the bookshelves at the local bookstores, it was hard to believe that hearing loss is the most common birth defect. There were rows upon rows of memoirs and educational materials on autism but only a few lonely and often outdated paperbacks relating to raising a child with hearing loss. I scooped those up greedily and while I was moved by such stories as Deaf Like Me by Thomas S. Spradley and James P. Spradley, I was a little scared by the world it described and the struggle faced by the author’s deaf daughter to communicate with the rest of the world. It broke my heart to imagine my son facing such isolation and frustration and I felt completely inadequate to guide him.
I was also alarmed when I ran across some not-sooptimistic articles on the Internet that quoted depressing statistics about poor school performance in children with hearing loss. According to one source, most did not graduate high school and many could not read beyond a third-grade level. What kind of life would my son have? How would he be able to support himself and have a career if he couldn’t communicate with others and did not have an education?
Fortunately, as I read more on the subject, I came to realize that many of these dismal predictions were outdated and, thanks to amazing strides in the technology of digital hearing aids and cochlear implants, as well as a more progressive and inclusive approach toward education for children with hearing loss, a new generation of deaf and hard of hearing kids is proving those stereotypes wrong.
My son is mainstreamed and, with the support of the incredible faculty at his school, he is not only keeping up with his peers but is a straight-A student. He is a happy, thriving child, and in most ways, a typical seven-year-old boy who loves dinosaurs, playing with his friends and You Tube videos of animated creatures passing gas. Yes, there are still challenges; he often misunderstands
things that people say. One day his secondgrade class had a guest speaker who had visited China
and told them some words, like “ni hao” for “hello.” My son came home that day and proudly informed me that the Chinese word for “hello” was “meow.” Another time when his grandmother told him about her ailing old dog, he told her matter-of-factly, “Well, you should take her to the vegetarian.”
I don’t know if I’m always doing the right things for my son (I’m pretty sure I’m not), and I may never know how it feels to be deaf or hard of hearing but I guess I’m easing up a little on the guilt. I suppose I knew that I was a good mother when I realized I had stopped thinking of him as hearing impaired. My son is a bright, artistically gifted child. His hearing loss is just one facet of who he is; it does not define or limit him. These days I am constantly amazed by the many incredible things
that he can do, instead of agonizing over what he might not be able to do. This is the most important thing any mother can do.
As for the man in the grocery store, one day I’ll stop harassing him. I don’t know why it bothers me so but I just want to prove to him, and myself, that I can connect with his world – although I realize that signing about cantaloupes and avocadoes hardly makes me a member of the Deaf community. And as with everything else, I’m learning as I go.
Kim Waters is a freelance writer and artist who lives in Augusta, Ga., with her husband Jason and two children Jay (eight) and Megan (two). Contact her at khwaters11@bellsouth.net.
