I knew my daughter could hear: not just because she loved music, but because she had perfect rhythm. She punched her fists in the air like a human metronome, and brought a doughy heel to the ground precisely on each down beat. I had thrown off the yoke of milestone-tracking months earlier, having become fixated on her inability to roll during the precise developmental week for rolling. So when she didn’t form consonants at the prescribed time, I made a deliberate choice to ignore it. It didn’t occur to me that deafness might not be an either/or binary, and that certain vibrations and pitches – the down beat of a Wiggles song, say – could be apprehended, while other subtle speech sounds might be snatched out of a sentence. So it was a couple of months after her first birthday when we discovered our Botticellian baby had mild hearing loss, and two years after that when she lost almost all of her remaining hearing entirely.
Like most hearing parents of deaf children, my first close relationship with a deaf person was with my child. Despite a relatively broad cultural education, I knew next to nothing about hearing loss or Deaf1 culture. What little I had absorbed was an incomplete and almost entirely inaccurate patchwork of pop culture snippets – the mother’s horror when her baby doesn’t react to the fire engine’s siren in the film Mr Holland’s Opus (1995); Beethoven’s struggle to hear the premiere of his Ninth Symphony; the lift scene in the film Jerry Maguire (1996); Quasimodo’s apparent industrial deafness; and, worst of all, the appalling memory of my university housemate imitating a deaf accent for laughs. This bleak landscape of ignorance and misinformation is often the lookout from which parents begin making decisions, as D/deaf critics have rightly pointed out. But although I began educating myself belatedly, it didn’t take long for the calcified layers of assumptions and approximations to disintegrate. Chief among them was the unquestioned belief that hearing loss, for an early deafened person, is even a loss at all.
In a recent interview with the news site Truthout, the Deaf philosopher Teresa Blankmeyer Burke argues that the language of tragic loss seems particularly ill-fitting for a deaf child: ‘Some of us do not share this experience [of loss] at all, but only know what it is to be in our bodies as they have always existed.’ News headlines about childhood deafness and hearing technology often slip into the ‘from deaf tragedy to hearing miracle’ narrative, missing this crucial point about self-concept entirely. For many parents, this has intuitive clarity too. Absolutely smitten with my baby’s many tiny perfections, I had a stubborn sense that her deafness was not a pit she had fallen into, but just one of many extraordinary discoveries about her that I was making every day. It was a comforting certainty to cling to in the wee hours, when I was beset by a looping reel of terrors about the shadowy obstacles she would undeservedly face, and that I would be impotent to protect her from. Even accepting the reality of life’s vicissitudes, most of us hope for a relatively smooth course for our children. Unfettered sensorial access to the world being at the bottom of a hierarchy of wishes, and fundamental to the rest. The idea that so much was arbitrarily denied a baby so new to the world was, at times, almost impossible to withstand.
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