Deaf Pagan Crossroads

First of all, I want to clarify… I did NOT write this article. It was sent to me by an interpreter friend several years ago, and I have had it in my computer files ever since. At that time, I was the leader of an on-line spirituality group which had both deaf and hearing members, and we were trying to educate some of the hearing folks about deafness, Deaf Culture, sign language, etc. etc. I was trying to talk about how frustrating it can be for a deaf child growing up in an all hearing family (which is the story of my life), and how even having good speech and lipreading skills (as I do) doesn’t always resolve that frustration. In response to my efforts, my friend posted this article… which I think was a real eye-opener for some of these hearies! It generated quite a bit of discussion within my group, and hopefully led to a greater understanding of and appreciation for some of the issues that we in the Deaf Community deal with regularly.

Perhaps some of you have seen this article before. I don’t know who the original author is, so if anyone does happen to know, please do inform me so that I can properly credit the writer. Obviously this is the mother of a deaf child sharing her own experiences… and she writes with a touching honesty about what raising a deaf child has been like for her. You may or may not agree with her views – and that’s okay. This is one person’s experience. Nevertheless, I think she makes some good points and has some important things to say.

Because the article is quite long, I am breaking it up into several smaller parts to make it easier for everyone to read. Each day I will post a new part to the article.

I hope that you enjoy it… and to the original writer – I hope no offense is taken at my reposting it here!

We had 19 people coming for Thanksgiving last year and no matter how we juggled the plates and chairs, my 14-year-old daughter, Bekah, and I were able to squeeze only 18 places at our rented table. Bekah, who is deaf and uses sign language to communicate, stood holding the extra plate. “You know,” she told me, “I don’t need to sit here. I’m not really going to understand what’s happening anyway.” Then she looked at my face, which must have shown my feelings, and signed, “No offense, Mom.”

I wasn’t offended. I was, however, aching, because I knew just why she felt that way. When the kids were younger, they would all eat quickly and run off to play, and Bekah could be included in the games without much difficulty. But now they are all teenagers and young adults and they don’t leave the table-the entertainment is talking. Even though there would be five of us at that Thanksgiving dinner who sign fluently when talking one-to-one with Bekah, in a larger group it doesn’t work that way. The conversation gets fast and funny and people interrupt, change topics and crack jokes, and we all tend to drop our signs. Although I’m the best signer in the family, interpreting for 19 people-while eating and attending to guests-is impossible. Bekah misses a lot, which is frustrating and hurtful.

We’ve spoken about hiring an interpreter to join us, but except for special occasions like her cousin’s wedding and her grandmother’s funeral, we’ve never done that. She thinks it’s too weird to hire someone to come to dinner at our house, and I share her feelings. I know it’s not only deaf teenagers who might prefer to skip a large holiday meal-hearing teens, too, can feel disconnected from their families, and, at a table without peers, get bored or annoyed. But for deaf teens, 90 percent of whom have hearing parents, there’s usually something else going on as well: There’s a good chance that before they’ve had the opportunity to make the natural adolescent choice of bowing out of the conversation, they’ve already been shut out of it. There’s a good chance that a deaf kid who says no thanks to sitting at the family table isn’t rejecting the scene so much as feeling rejected herself.

So that Thanksgiving Day, I moved plates, silverware and napkins closer together to make room for another place setting, and told Bekah how important it was to me that she sit with us.

The day my husband and I learned that Bekah was deaf, we enrolled her in a deaf preschool and enrolled ourselves in sign language classes. Although we had no knowledge of sign language at the time, neither of us doubted that we wanted to use it with Bekah. She was 17 months old, and so hungry for language that, within two weeks, she had learned to sign 50 words. Words filled her mind and her hands-cheese, cookie, doggie, brother, shoes, mine, Mommy, Daddy, cracker-and soon she had as many words as most toddlers her age.

Although I was filled with grief during those early weeks, it was obvious that Bekah was not; it was clear to all of us that she was relieved. Gone were the tears because I had brought her the wrong juice, gone were the grunts and points as she struggled to tell us what she wanted. Despite my sadness, I loved seeing her baby signs; despite my fears, I was so glad to be learning how to communicate with her. Still, I was overwhelmed at the prospect of having to learn another language to raise my daughter. We were actually studying two new languages at the same time: Signing Exact English (SEE), a signed system that coordinates with speech and which the teachers at Bekah’s school advocated, and American Sign Language (ASL), the visual language of the deaf, which has its own grammar and syntax, and which the deaf professors at our community college taught.

Native ASL signers feel passionate about the beauty and clarity of their language; when writing, they capitalize the word deaf to distinguish deafness as a culture from deafness as a diagnosis. SEE advocates, mostly hearing people in the field of deaf education, feel strongly that it’s better to use a sign system that coordinates with spoken and written language. I was aware of the philosophical differences between the two groups, as well as the harshness with which they judged each other. But at that time I didn’t care which system we used-I just wanted to be able to talk to my baby.

And the truth was, I didn’t trust either system. All these words she is signing, I thought, are nouns. They’re all concrete objects. Yes, I could understand how she learned the word “shoes”-I pointed to her shoes, signed “shoes” and after a few times she got it. She was signing “shoes,” and she was going to retrieve her own shoes if I signed the word; it was great-exactly what a toddler needed to know. But how, I wondered, will she understand concepts? How will I ever teach her to express her feelings, her ideas and her dreams? In fact, it was her dreams that saved me. A few months after we had learned of her deafness, Bekah climbed into my bed in the early morning darkness, took my face in her hands to awaken me, and then when my eyes opened, she signed, “Dream, wow!”

I burst into tears. “Dream, wow!” is a concept. You can’t point to a dream and you can’t hold one in your hands like a pair of shoes. And Bekah had learned the concept of dreaming the same way any hearing child learns it, of course. When we kissed her good night we told her “Sweet dreams”; when we read books to her, we pointed to the child in the bed and signed, “Maybe that boy is dreaming now.” On occasion I would tell her what I had dreamt. This really works, I thought, as I lay in bed that morning, overwhelmed with relief, and watched my daughter’s hands. Bekah had proved to me that she was learning a language that could express something we weren’t looking at. I don’t think I understood that I could be the kind of mother I longed to be until I knew that Bekah would be able to tell me her dreams.

And that changed everything. It meant, for starters, that I could trust that Bekah could understand the consequences of her behavior. Understanding “You touch that stove, you get burned” depends on the toddler having language available. You don’t have to allow children to get burned to teach the concept-that is the magic of language. The next time they are near something hot, you can remind them, “It’s hot, like the stove. Careful you don’t get burned.” It’s hard enough to teach cause and effect to a toddler with language, but without it, it’s impossible. It’s hard enough to reassure preschoolers with language that Mommy will come back home after work, but without language, it simply cannot be done.