Gloria ~ May 14

 

Read a post on FB last night from Marcia, one of Ron’s deaf friends. There’s a photo of her and her three grown children and she writes about how they all came to dinner and how lovely it was to talk to them for hours. I got suddenly very emotional reading that and could not understand why.  

 

Had to think about it.

 

Ron introduced me to her a couple of years ago. I was intrigued by her relationship with her hearing children…all of whom were taught to sign fluently… so very different from my own experience with deaf parents. She was in turn both intrigued and surprised  by that difference and invited me to her advanced ASL class to talk to  the students about growing up a Coda not taught or allowed to sign.

 

I would eventually base my TEDx talk with Ron around her and her children. About everything I saw that was so right about that close family, and how the presence of a common language was so crucial…the lynchpin…the solid rock and foundation of a lifelong connection. 

 

I did not have that.

 

My mother wanted children. But not deaf children. She wanted to meet my father when she found out that..just like herself...he was the only deaf child in a hearing family. She thought the odds were on her side that their children would be hearing. That is actually not normally the case, but she got what she wanted, hearing children. 

 

And that’s where the trouble began.

 

At that time, hearing children could be taken away from deaf parents. My mother’s solution to that was to fight the family by proving she could be a good mother and raise functioning hearing children. 

 

All well and good, she was an excellent teacher. We could read and write before kindergarten. Certainly speak.

 

But  only to her. And only by her lip reading, which is not fully communicating. And not at all to my father who mainly signed and did not read lips.

 

My mother said in an interview that her children “had to grow up fast and stand on their own two feet.”

 

That’s because we were the buffer between our parents and the hearing world. No time for tantrums or slamming doors or teenage angst. 

 

Besides, as my mother always said:

You can hear. You have nothing to cry about,

 

So when my father was dying I was in charge. Talking to the doctor and deciding on heroic measures or letting him go peacefully. I let him go.  But without emotion and without tears.

Taking care of business.

 

Ten years later I heard Dan Fogelberg sing Leader Of The Band and I couldn’t stop crying.

 

That was for my father.

 

When my mother passed I was home working out finances for her move to a nursing home. When the phone rang at ten that morning, I knew she was gone. The facility asked if I was going to come up but I had to stay to make all the arrangements. 

Which I did.

 

That was 2007. Seeing Marcia’s piece was the first time I deeply grieved my mother. Feeling the loss not only  of her, but of what could ...and should...have been.