of my fondest memories is sitting with her in the living room and watching Little House on the Prairie. She interpreted for me in sign language. She sat on the fireplace hearth, and I sat on the floor. That was in third grade. Later, in eighth grade, while she was getting my brother and me off to school every morning before rushing off to work herself, my girlfriends would call to say what they were wearing, which really slowed us down, but she always put up with it and told me, wanting me to feel like I was one of the crowd.
It was different with my dad. He’s less emotional than my mother and more or less deals with things as they come. Of course, he was very saddened that I had lost my hearing, even a bit angry at first as well. It was hard for him to have a hearing daughter one day and deaf the next. I think he was comforted though by how well I seemed to be adjusting. He was proud of me for that. Later he would say that had I been another child, he might have worried more, but that my self-confidence made him confident that things would work out and that I handled everything better than anyone possibly could have. He was also comforted and felt rewarded by the fact that my close friends in the neighborhood just accepted me for who I was and were still my friends. That’s what really let him know that everything was going to be all right.
One of my favorite memories with my dad is going to these father/daughter events called Indian Princesses. Grasping sign language hadn’t come all that easy for him, which I think he may have felt a little bad about, but I remember him interpreting for me at those gatherings. He was Big Feather, and I was Little Feather. I also remember him occasionally taking me to the mall to go clothes shopping. He was never overprotective or anything when we did things together. After a while, for both my parents and for me, my being deaf just became the way it was.
My close friends were very supportive from the start by just being regular with me, which truly meant the world to me. The fact that I was an extremely self-confident child helped me to adjust as well. The only difficulty I had was feeling dizzy the first few weeks after coming home from the hospital, due to an imbalance in my ears. I remember having to crawl around the front yard; it was a bit slanted and was easy for me lose my footing.
At times, I thought I was getting my hearing back—I’d swear that I’d heard something, like the church organ when we went on Sundays and the sound of the waves at the beach when we visited my family in New Jersey. I would hear them crashing inside my head. But it was more phantasmal hearing; ultimately, I always faced the silence. Today I can still remember the sound of that church organ, and the waves crashing, and the sound of paper crumbling, though they grow more and more distant. I have no memory of voices.
The fall after I became deaf, I started first grade in a school that had a deaf program. To maintain my speech, my mother wanted me mainstreamed in a regular classroom with hearing children. I had a resource teacher who worked with me one-on-one. I was the only deaf student in the entire class. I watched the deaf kids in the class next door and copied what they did. Years later, my mother told me that I pretended to sign, using signs that had no meaning, like a child playing make-believe. I also fiddled with my hearing aid wires and the controls. Eventually, it became clear that I needed more support; so in second grade, I finally went into a deaf class and loved it.
It was an “oral” class, meaning that the teacher spoke and didn’t use sign language. We read her lips, so I continued using my speech, as my mother had wanted (as do most hearing parents who have a deaf child). I had already grasped the essentials of English: pronunciation, syntax, inflexion, even idioms, which had all come by ear. I had the basis of a vocabulary, which would only be enhanced by reading, and I continued reading at home with my parents. There were only three students in the class—Tom Halik and Tommy Miller, who could both hear a bit and had spoken language, and completely deaf me. Every day, I’d watch our teacher, Mrs. Kutz—with her long black hair cut in a feathered, wispy style and her huge smile—write on the overhead projector (this allowed us to absorb things by having the benefit of a visual aid) and read her lips all day long.
It was then that I became more aware that I was different. In first grade, I had done pretty much whatever the other kids did, but with the work becoming more academic, I began realizing that I was missing directions and puzzled about some of the assignments. Mrs. Kutz discovered that I couldn’t spell well and began giving me additional help.
The class next door to mine was for the deaf kids who used sign language and didn’t use their voices at all; they were students who were born deaf or who had lost their hearing prelingually (the more common scenario compared to mine).
Those were the kids who taught me how to sign.
I had started picking it up from them from the moment I’d started school—at recess, in gym, and while sitting with them on the school bus day after day after day. By the end of first grade, I was signing right along with them.
In fourth grade, I finally made my first deaf girlfriend, Lisa, and it was a big deal to me. Other than the kids at school, I played with my hearing friends from the neighborhood. Even though Lisa and I spoke in class, we signed when we played together. I remember the day my father drove me to Lisa’s house for the first time my mother was just overjoyed.
It’s amazing to me now when I remember that when Lisa and I played together, we couldn’t watch television or go to the movies. (Today, it’s hard to imagine Zoe not in front of the TV.) But closed-captioning wasn’t available then; it didn’t become widely available until the early 1990s. Lisa and I couldn’t even listen to music. But life was good.
There were challenges. Once, I was left in the stacks of the school library during a fire drill. There were childhood trials. Even though my closest friends remained true, other kids teased me. The kids in the playground made fun of the way I talked. (Not being able to hear my own voice impacted my speech.) Once, a kid asked me if my hearing aids went through my head. “Yeah, right through my braaain,” I told him, thinking what a jerk he was. Some kids didn’t even believe I was deaf, so I took them to my house to show them the “Caution, Deaf Child” sign that my mother had put on the front lawn.
I hated that sign with a vengeance. “Why do I need a sign to tell cars about me?” I wanted to know. My mother just wanted them to slow down, of course. What I hated most was riding in the bus for “special needs” kids, which the year before my friends and I had named the “baby” bus. It was half the size of the regular bus. Other people may have thought I was different, but to me, I was still the same. I wasn’t handicapped or special, and I certainly didn’t need a sign or a baby bus. I didn’t want to be different, and I didn’t want to be labeled. Yet, even though I was unable to express those concerns, I was more upset by them than by the fact that I was deaf.
In third grade, we got a new swim coach. Even though none of my previous swim coaches had ever coached a deaf kid before, this coach was so closed-minded and was very uncomfortable around me; he honestly believed that my being deaf limited my swimming ability. He took me out of the lineup, which really angered and humiliated me because I had never been behind with my start: I would wait for the smoke to appear from the starting gun when it went off, and then, bam, I was off. I was one of the best backstroke swimmers and had been on the swim team every summer. It was the first time that anyone had made me feel like a second-class citizen because I was deaf. Fortunately, my mother spoke to the coach, he put me back in the lineup, and things worked out after that.
Despite the few mishaps, I had adjusted very well to being deaf. I was succeeding academically, I had become a good lip-reader and signer, and I still had speech. Even though a few kids in the playground wouldn’t play with me anymore, I was thriving socially; when my deaf friends weren’t at my house playing, my hearing friends were. I was part of the crowd and having fun, doing homework, and joining in after-school activities. My desire to do well, be accepted, and please others, such as my parents and teachers, especially since becoming deaf, also helped—as did my self-confidence.
Who
