Gloria ~ May 12

 

Happy Mother’s Day to the indomitable late Muriel Stella Feigenbaum Rosen. 

 

Am looking at a 1993 photo of my mother on a visit to her favourite teacher, Miss Gertrude Crocker, on the occasion of her 112 birthday. There is a sign on her door that says:

“If I am asleep when you come please wake me! I want to see you!”

 

She was my mother’s teacher at PS 47 School for the deaf from 1924 -1926. 

The years that forever changed her life.

In that photo, the love and gratitude and respect my mother had for her teacher is clearly visible. 

 

 

My mother was born severely hard of hearing, but by some amazing birthright she was a natural lip reader. So good in fact that her parents never caught on that she really could not understand them unless they were face to face. So they would hit her if she did not come when called or at times seemed to ignore them. 

 

This went on until she was twelve years old when a neighbour saw what was going on and told her parents their child was not bad…just deaf…and stop hitting her!!

 

So they had her tested and the doctor confirmed her hearing loss but objected to her parents switching their opinion of her from bad child…to stupid child. Assuming…as was the case back then and indeed to this day…that deaf and stupid are synonymous. 

 

What the doctor did then was life changing for my mother. 

 

He told her parents to send her to PS 47 School For The Deaf.

 

Those were the best two years of her childhood. She made friends she would keep for the rest of her life, and would learn from understanding and compassionate and most important….respectful…teachers. 

 

So thank you Miss Crocker, without you I would most  certainly not be here today.