silence, I was painfully reminded that my hearing was not what it was supposed to be. I was beginning to feel very different and alone.
The thing about lipreading is this: even though I’m very good at it, at best I can only follow 50 percent of what’s going on, which is usually enough for me to get the gist of the conversation and respond appropriately, but sometimes it isn’t. One-on-one, I communicated very well. I did fine. But in a group, it became impossible to lip-read what everybody was saying. At night, it really became difficult when I couldn’t see my friends’ faces. Yet, I thought about my deaf friends, over there in the deaf program, whom I saw on the weekends and at other times, playing around and having fun with deaf people whom I hadn’t met yet, and I started longing to be a part of that.
I was caught between two realities, yearning for fuller communication and to be around deaf people, yet feeling that gigantic pull toward the hearing world; my friends’ and family’s influence on me was just so huge. I knew that they were all well intentioned when they told me that I was fine in the hearing world. But deep inside, I began feeling more and more that I was different and functioned differently than they did, and that they were so wrong.
THE SPRING OF 1984, toward the end of my freshman year, was brutal. Torn between wanting to stay in the hearing world and yearning for a fuller connection with deaf people, I realized I needed to decide whether to stay at Central High or transfer the following fall to Hinsdale South, which had a deaf program and was thirty minutes from my home. When I mentioned it to Chris, she was extremely disappointed that I would even consider Hinsdale South. She just genuinely believed that Central was the best place for me and that I could make it there.
I agonized over the decision for weeks; no one knew what I was going through, not even my mother. I couldn’t express it, but at fifteen years old, I knew that I wasn’t just choosing a school—I was choosing a life. Staying at Central meant I’d probably go to a college such as Illinois State with my friends, marry hearing, and remain in that world. Going to Hinsdale South meant I’d probably go to Gallaudet University or National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), marry a deaf person, and be in the Deaf World. Being on the fence—dabbling in both worlds but never fully embracing either—no longer felt tolerable.
It was an overwhelming decision, yet my heart knew the answer—and had known it all along. I finally chose Hinsdale South and that year said good-bye to my hearing friends from the neighborhood. I couldn’t articulate to them why I was leaving; I just told them that I was going to South, to the deaf program. I didn’t know how to say that I felt tired and defeated from playing a game I knew I couldn’t win and wasn’t good for me anyway. How could I tell them that I was mourning the life I had known since I was six, or that the things I had done had been fun and had served me well but could no longer lead me where I needed to go? On some level, I think they understood. After that, I only saw them when we bumped into one another on the street, and it was always bittersweet.
I’d made my decision in the spring but avoided telling Chris until school was almost out. I was too scared to tell her, for fear of disappointing her. Carrying that pressure around inside me all that time felt awful. I think she knew I was avoiding her. I remember the day I finally told her very well. I went to her house, and, through my tears, told her that I was leaving Central. She ended up being more upset that I had been so scared to tell her. She said that it was okay, that what was important was that I had “tried.” I walked home feeling so much lighter. I knew then that I was really done with that part of my life—and I wasn’t looking back.
I had no regrets, but it was tough. Half of it was that I thought I would miss my friends and that I was disappointing them, which was devastating. But the other half, which I was finally acknowledging, was that I felt like they had disappointed me by telling me I was someone I wasn’t, by saying that I could function as a hearing person, and by making me feel that I wasn’t meeting their standards. I was very hard on myself, striving to stand tall, and yet I felt as if I had failed in their eyes.
I prayed to find peace with my decision, find acceptance and peace with myself. I needed peace with my life, my family, my neighborhood friends, and the world. Although I didn’t agree with everyone’s claim that I was normal like them, I wasn’t savvy enough to explain to them how I felt or what I needed. I wasn’t able to say that even though I walked down the hallways in school with a big smile on my face, a deep-down part of me wanted to curl up in the corner and have everybody leave me alone. I remember walking over to the cornfields about a block from my house one day and just sitting there, in the middle of the stalks, trying to come to terms with it all. I was longing to hear some wisdom that would help me see the light. I didn’t want to feel like the lone soldier out there.
I arrived at Hinsdale South and loved it. The school had 2,000 hearing students and 150 deaf students—so many more than in elementary school and junior high, as the deaf kids from each district came to Hinsdale. They all took classes in the deaf wing—except me. Even after making the huge decision to switch schools, I still avoided the deaf program and took all my core classes with the hearing kids, with the use of a sign language interpreter. Part of me still believed that I was smarter than the other deaf students, and I still needed to cling to what was familiar and to what I thought people expected of me. I was still entrenched in the hearing world and was not ready to loosen the ties.
Even so, I took a few classes with the deaf kids, like Health and Consumer Education, and these classes ended up being my favorites. I just loved the direct communication and soaked it in; it was so much more fulfilling than finding out what was going on through an interpreter. I socialized with the deaf kids at lunch, in gym class, and after school, as well, becoming part of a group and the culture I craved.
The summer between my sophomore and junior years, twenty of us went to a deaf camp in the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York; we all took the bus there together. This Catholic camp, called Camp Mark Seven, was run by a deaf priest named Father Tom. I had no expectations—my friends were going, so I went along. We arrived right before dinnertime and checked into our dorms.
Whoa. I had walked into a different world, into Deaf Culture, and into the Deaf community.
Everyone there was either deaf or they signed—the counselors, cooks, maintenance people, lifeguards—right down to the nurse. It wasn’t participating in the camp activities with my deaf friends that made the difference—I’d done lots of activities with them at school—the difference was that the entire staff was also deaf. Until that time, I had never really interacted with a single deaf adult. These days, it’s different; but back in the 1980s, most teachers for the deaf, like those at South, were hearing. My parents and relatives were all hearing. In the Deaf Culture, we talk about the 90 percent rule: 90 percent of deaf parents have hearing children, and 90 percent of deaf children have hearing parents. Over the years, I’ve met deaf children who thought they were going to die by the time they reached eighteen because they had never met a deaf adult. Many certainly don’t believe they can make it in the general culture.
It was as if I could finally believe in my future.
For the first time since I was six years old, I was signing with deaf adults in an environment where communication was 100 percent accessible to me. I had full communication. No more missing out on parts of conversations; no more feeling like I wasn’t being understood. For two whole weeks, I was smack in the middle of everything and soaked it up like nothing before—helping out in the mess hall and making meals with George the cook, and helping the lifeguard put away the pool chairs. When I rode home on the bus two weeks later, I immediately felt like my communication was gone—like the air
