Gloria ~ May 9

 

WALLS

 

Thinking today about Tirza’s walls…

 

Sometimes they are necessary to protect ourselves, as I just did today with a meeting on zoom that I knew immediately was not going to go well for me. I am already in a stew with lot of pain from an arthritic knee that has been acting up, and I could foresee what the result of this meeting was going to be and I decided that at my age I don’t  need to add existential pain to the already existing physical discomfort. 

 

So I erected a wall of impenetrable protection and got out.

 

The walls around my childhood were also not concrete…not visible. But they were most certainly there, inadvertently constructed by my mother with all apparent outward reason and good intentions.

 

My parents were deaf, my mother very verbal, my father barely understandable. Their common language was sign, I believe mostly family sign mixed with formal ASL.

 

When their children were born hearing, the families had doubts that my parents could raise us to speak and read and instead as my grandmother predicted would:

 

“Wiggle the fingers in the air and not talk.”

 

Just like my father.

 

So my very strong minded and determined mother decided that her children would not learn to sign…not be part of her deaf world…even if that meant she would have to be the interpreter between her children and their father. 

 

And so the wall was constructed. Hearing on one side…Deaf on the other. No common language…and not even a common world as the Deaf world seals itself off from the unfeeling and and brutal treatment of the hearing who discard them as “dumb” and make them objects of ridicule.  

 

When up against a particular piece of stupidity my mother would say: 

 

You know….hearing people…

 

In her most derogatory tone, forgetting for the moment…or not caring…that her children were, indeed, hearing.

 

For a while I had my brother on my side of the wall…but he left when I was 14…and then I was alone… with all my secrets… behind that wall in my hearing world.