It is eleven o’clock at night and my house is filled with the sound of eight teenagers sitting around my family room chatting and laughing. Some of them are signing, some of them are animatedly talking. Some of them are deaf, some are hard of hearing and two of them have hearing in the normal range. Three of them are mine and all three have hearing aids perched in their ears. My youngest sports colorful earmolds with red, white and blue swirls. I’ve got a pair of blue earmolds with sparkles shining out from under my dark hair.
As I watch the kids talk excitedly about some silly photo on Facebook, I’m thinking back to my own teen years. My summers as a teen were spent hiding the fact that I couldn’t hear. As soon as the school year ended in the late spring, my lone hearing aid was placed on a ledge and never touched until the first day of school in the fall. I spent my summers with a great group of friends, many who knew just what to do to make communication happen between us. I depended a lot on my lipreading skills to piece together conversations. It was the casual group gatherings that had me bluffing my way through conversations because it was next to impossible to lipread the many lips that were speaking at the same time.
Then there was the stigma of being different, of standing out. I tried hard not to stand out, instead trying everything I could to blend in and be “one of them.”
My life changed in an instant the summer I was nineteen. I was barefooting behind the boat, practicing wake crossing. As my feet skimmed across the water, my foot caught the edge of the wake and I slammed into the water. There was no time to do a normal tuck and roll, something I had done many times before. When I climbed into the boat, I tried to shake the water out of my ears. Everything sounded muffled–lips moved but there wasn’t the usual sound to match with it.
It wasn’t until many days later that I realized that I had become deaf.
My life took an interesting turn at that point. Once the grief subsided and I dried the tears, I entered a new world filled with deaf and hard of hearing people. It wasn’t easy– because I had spent the previous 19 years of my life hiding my hearing aid and feeling quite uncomfortable with anything that reminded me that I was “different.” It took awhile for me to learn American Sign Language and get to the point that I embraced a deaf identity. Once I did, there was an amazing transformation in my life: Yes, I am deaf and gosh-darn-it, that’s perfectly ok.
One by one, my own kids began to lose their hearing and soon our lives were filled with hearing aids, IEPs, signing, speech therapy and other families with deaf and hard of hearing kids. I do see the same struggles to understand everything being said around them, but I also see that my kids are growing up with a very different attitude than I had–they’re comfortable with themselves, assertive in getting their communication needs met… and they don’t hide their hearing aids. They have access to texting, interpreters, captioning, videophones and more. They’re growing up with deaf and hard of hearing role models– something that I didn’t have access to.
I came across a quote on Twitter recently that perfectly sums up what I wish I had known when I was growing up:
Why are you trying so hard to fit in when you were born to stand out? –Unknown
Originally published on Chicago Moms Blog.
Comments
2 responses to “Embracing My Deaf Self”
I love it! What a great quote. And, of course, we’re big fans of colorful earmolds 🙂
i love that quote! just what i needed to read! i’m a phd student and am slowly losing more and more hearing, it has been an odd thing to deal with, but nothing that i’m ashamed of. it is me 🙂