There are no guarantees…

There are no guarantees, as much as we'd like them. And that is a good thing. It opens our minds to the goodness of other possibilities we might not otherwise have considered.

Twenty-eight years ago I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. He was the absolute delight of our lives. Nineteen months later we discovered, to our absolute desolation, that he couldn't hear a thing. We were living apart then, my spouse in another state starting a new job, and our son and I staying behind to sell the house.  My spouse had to struggle with the fact that his son was less than perfect.  That didn’t bother me so much as the fact that I was thrown into a world I knew nothing about.  We lived in a rural area and there were, maybe, a handful of deaf people in the 4-county area.  So I read everything I could get my hands on.  I vowed that my son would not be “handicapped.”  He would be a boy who simply had ears that didn’t work.  I threw myself into learning to sign.  Fortunately I could start at a two-year old level!

The time since then has been different from what it would have been had he been able to hear - we had to learn a new language, and learn that people stare in restaurants; we had to learn that we couldn't talk to him and cook dinner at the same time; we had to learn that people are afraid of what they don't understand; we had to learn that people can be cruel and prejudiced; we had to learn that very few had paradigms big enough to accommodate what we knew he could do; we had to learn that our own families were not willing to learn to communicate with him; I had to accept that he would never hear music.

But we also learned that sign language is a beautifully expressive way of communicating; we learned that, in advocating for him, we have expanded the possibilities for other deaf kids; we learned that our other two kids have an incredible sense of justice and fairness; we learned that our fears were manageable, that as daunting a task as it seemed at the beginning, we could do it; and we have learned that our beautiful baby boy has grown into a beautiful young man that I am so very proud to say is my son.

I had been told years earlier that, when he got to be around 13 or 14 years old, he would go through a “why me” stage that would really be unpleasant.  He never did.  So a few years ago I asked him why he thought he hadn’t.  Now, understand that he was answering as a 21 or 22 year-old trying to remember what he might have thought or felt 8 or 9 years earlier.  But I was struck by his answer.  He said that he understood that he is who he is because of the experiences he has had in his life.  He knew that some of his experiences were a direct result of his being deaf, and that other experiences were shaped by his deafness.  Had he not been deaf, he would be a different person.  He said he likes who he is, so has no regrets about being deaf. 

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