Kodas as interpreters

Awhile back, I wrote about one experience I had as a child interpreting for my parents. I was about 12 and had been injured. My mother and I went to a lawyer’s office because my parents felt the miniature golf place had been negligent and that’s why I was hurt. The whole meeting went badly and my mother blamed me for not telling the story right. Looking back, I see how unfair it was. I was a kid intimidated and confused by an attorney who obviously didn’t want to deal with a deaf client.

But what else could my parents do then?

It was the 1960s. I didn’t think that time was the Stone Age but technologically, it was.

There were no professional interpreters. There were no TTYs. There was no closed captioning.

We moved to Maryland when I was 10 because my dad was laid off and unemployed for about a year. I remember eating hot dogs every night–or so it seemed. We’d have to eat swordfish, which I hated, and anything my grandfather happened to catch. I think my father hated being beholdened to my mom’s family and when they suggested welfare, that was it. He looked out of state for work and found it.

I remember the day we drove to Maryland. It seemed to take forever and by the time we got to our rented house in Baltimore, it was already getting dark. Our neighbor helped us with the move. He helped us unload our stuff and then was eager to get back and left.

That was when we realized there was no heat in the house. It was December, a day or so after Christmas. My mother and younger brother were sick with something–a cold, or maybe the flu. My dad was very angry about the lack of heat. The landlord knew we were moving in that day. He drove me to the nearest pay phone and we called the landlord first.

This was the very first time I acted as the interpreter. The landlord told me that he’d notified Baltimore Gas & Electric. He told me to call the operator and ask for the number. I had to get another dime from my father and that just made him madder. I called BG&E next.

When I started to get the run around again, I almost broke down and cried. The man on the phone didn’t want to talk to me. When I told him my father was deaf, he just seemed to get annoyed. We would have to wait until Monday. I told my father what he said and my dad began to yell. The man on the phone began to yell at me.

All of a sudden, I got mad too. This wasn’t fair. Our lives had been turned upside down, I’d been moved away from the grandmother I loved so dearly and now we were all cold. I had to fix this. I said, “Listen, mister, my mom is sick. My brother has a fever. Maybe he’ll have to go to the hospital.” I didn’t know if that was true or not but I felt instinctively I was on the right track.

The man stopped yelling.

I was so tired and angry and misterable about the cold and my father stomping around in frustration that I just began to cry.

It worked. “Don’t cry, don’t cry,” he was saying. “We’ll get someone out there to turn your heat on.”

“And the ‘lectric too.” Sniff, sniff. “We have no lights.”

Sure, sure, the electric too.

I hung up and told my father someone was coming. He looked at me like I was some kind of god–at least, that’s the way it felt to me. I had made a miracle occur. I didn’t like the feeling but at the same time, it made me feel good–powerful.

For a long time, we couldn’t afford to have a telephone. We would go to the pay phone to call my grandmother and I was limited to 3 minutes. I hated that. There was never enough time to say what I wanted to say, especially with my parents standing at my shoulder demanding to know what Grandma was saying. “Tell her this, tell her that,” they’d say. It hurt me because I wanted to talk to Grandma by myself. I’d hold my finger up to stop my parents from bugging me, indicating I was listening hard.

When I hung up, my mother wanted to know everything my Grandma said. She got mad because I gave her the conversation in less than three minutes. You are leaving things out, she said to me. I wasn’t–it’s just that I couldn’t tell her each and every word that passed between Grandma and me. It wasn’t that I was trying to keep secrets, it was just the I couldn’t remember each and every word.

One day a man came from Western Union and delivered a telegram to my parents. It was from my father’s sister and the message was terse: Please call. We went to the pay phone and I called my aunt. My Grandma Molly (Dad’s mother) had died. She’d had another stroke, a massive one. Without really thinking about it, I blurted the news to my father.

I look back on it now…here I was, 10 years old and telling my father his mother had died. He was heartbroken of course.

Not long after that, another telegram came. This time, my mother’s father had passed away. The only good thing about that was getting to talk to Grandma for more than 3 minutes.

A few months after that, another telegram arrived and this time, my heart broke. I could barely get the words out to my parents. This time, it was my father’s brother, my favorite uncle. I cried so hard and so long my parents worried I would get very sick.

The next time I saw the Western Union truck pull up in front of my house, I ran and tried to hide under the bed. I was terrified that it would be Grandma this time and I just couldn’t stand it. My parents found me though and I had to go get on the phone again.

I was relieved to find that Grandma had not died. It was my mother’s brother this time, my uncle and godfather. My parents had asked him to manage the renting and finances of our house. I didn’t know any of those details. My uncle was telling me something about putting the house in escrow.

Escrow? What is escrow? My uncle tried to explain it to me and I just became more confused. Meanwhile, my parents were tapping me impatiently. What’s he saying? they wanted to know. I started to panic. I had to tell them something.

I said my uncle was putting the house in a cage. I reasoned that a crow was a bird and birds go into cages in a home. My parents looked at me like I was out of my mind. My uncle said he’d write and explain to my parents. When he did, they were very upset and angry. I didn’t explain it right, they told me, and my uncle had lost their house.

How can you lose a house? I wondered. A house is awfully big. They said my uncle was stupid and so was I. I guessed we had to be, to lose something as large as a house.

Now I look back and realize how wrong it is to use a child as an interpreter. I’m not blaming my parents, that’s not what I mean. It’s wrong because children are attached to their parents and they are too young to understand abstract concepts. Kids blame themselves when things go wrong. I believed my parents when they said it was my fault because I didn’t get the story right. And you know what? A child should never have to tell a parent that his or her mother or father died. That is just wrong.

Deaf parents these days have access to so many more services than my parents did. I am sure they use professional interpreters or the TTY for communication with other adults. I would be a different person had those services been available to my parents. Do I wish for that? Not really…I didn’t know any other way of life and if I wasn’t who I am now, I wouldn’t have what I have now.

It’s not easy to complain all the time

So a friend of mine just blogged that she lost her job after the people who hired her were axed. She’s been suffering from some really bad karma and mentioned that she doesn’t like to complain too much because it just gets tiresome.

I know how she feels. My silence on this blog hasn’t been because all of a sudden things have been rosey and wonderful…more like the opposite. The thing is, though, I get sick of talking or thinking about it. I imagine what other people might think: oh lord, here comes that Job family again.

I’ve been doing lots of stuff to try and forget my worries:

*I play computer games
*I read
*I blog about anything else
*I obsess about my favorite TV program
*I play with my cats
*I daydream about living in a nice little cottage by the beach–with just DH and he and I are both free from pain

The most recent woes I prefer not to think about:

*We can’t pay our bills because there’s not enough income coming in
*DH is suffering so from pain and depression. It’s very discouraging not to be able to help and painful to watch him go through this
*OSD wants us to write character letters to keep her out of jail
*YSD bought a LEMON with the return she gypped TLG’s dad out of. I guess there’s a certain justice in that.
*DOD has been having some real profound mood swings lately
*I’m still on an emotional seesaw myself. In fact, I sort of feel manic and haven’t been sleeping
*My parents’ computer still doesn’t work right and something is up with my brother because he’s fed up with everything and trying to get a new job and move out of state

So now I’m going back to my computer game. I know it’s after midnight and I only got 4 hours of sleep last night but what am I gonna do?

Getting Help and Medications

Today DH and I went to talk to our therapist who has been helping us cope and work through all the issues with our OSD and YSD.  She’s really great, very empathetic and also informative.  She’s the one that was explaining that even though I’ve been through therapy for ACOA and other issues years ago,  each time I get to a new life stage I may have to readdress all of them.

She’s definitely right on in terms of YSD who is neglectful toward her son.  It was driving me insane with rage and it’s at the point that I can barely stand to look at her or talk to her.  When TLG comes looking for me, I’ll stop what I’m doing to play with him.  The therapist said we should document when YSD neglects TLG and I’ve been doing that all along.  There’s an agency related to Child Protective Services that can do an intervention and work with her on parenting skills.

We need that because she doesn’t want any of us telling her how to live her life.  She wants to do what she wants to do and the hell with the rest of us.  She’s manipulative and a pathological liar.  It’s very hard not to just toss her out and she knows she has (or used to have) the upper hand because of TLG.  But now we have Plan B.

Why is she the way she is?  It’s probably a combination of things that happened to her and a poor role model.  DH was working 3 jobs and wasn’t around much and his first wife wasn’t such a great mom.  In fact, I’ve been told YSD and her mom could be twins.  And what happened to the mom?  She was sexually abused as a child, neglected and abandoned too.  YSD was sexually abused, too, at a very young age and a lot of her issues stem from that, I’m sure.  I felt for her and wanted to help her, gave her books and advice from my experience … She always says “I’ll think about it” and then does exactly as she pleases.

How can you not be on time to pick up your child from the very first day of school?  How can you not respond to his ear pain and give him relief?  How can you place him–a child with special needs–in front of a TV because you’re too “lazy” to play with him?  Lazy–that’s the word she used, not me, and boy, I nearly went through the roof that day.

When you have a child, your life and your world change dramatically.  It’s no longer what you want first and at what ever cost, the child comes first…except to her.  She has to be “fair” to herself after all.  Give me a break! And so she’ll go off without a word, many times without asking any of us to keep an eye on her child, and she’ll disappear for hours.  We feed him, bathe him, and play with him, wondering…where is she and when is she coming back?  No more!  Next time it happens, I’m calling that agency!

If you don’t work hard to break the abuse cycle, it just goes on and on.  I am not a model mom but I remember clearly that I did NOT want to be like mine and so when I had my babies I went out and bought a book called <u>The ACOA Guide To Healthy Parenting </u> and it helped a lot.  I think my kids are only half as screwed up as me and hopefully my grandchildren won’t be screwed up at all…the ones DS, DOD and DYD have anyway.

Unfortunately, my grandkids in another state (OSD’s kids) are messed up.  I keep telling her to make sure those kids get counseling but she seems to think they’re just fine.  Sure they are.  I know better!

With all of this stress going on, it’s no wonder I’m on antidepressants (two), anti-anxiety and sleep aid meds.  I’ve just found out that I’m bipolar so I’m taking a mood stabilizer too.  Being bipolar…I’m not terribly surprised, it explains a lot…but I’m about as thrilled about it as I was to learn I have diabetes.  Anyway, after the news about Heath Ledger came out today I looked up all my meds to see how they interact with each other.

I’m about scared out of my wits.

Is it that the benefits of these drugs outweigh the risks and that’s why doctors prescribe them so easily?  I know the doctors didn’t tell me about all these side effects and interactions…but that was my responsibility to ask, wasn’t it?  Now I’m going to be asking!  I think I’d rather suffer with anxiety attacks and insomnia than worry about going to sleep and not waking up again because of the way my prescribed drugs interact. How many times does this sort of thing happen and we just don’t know because we aren’t famous like Heath Ledger or Anna Nicole Smith?

Therapy

DH and I had a good session with our therapist today. It’s been really helpful to go and try to sort out all the poopie stuff in our lives right now, including the antics of OSD and YSD. OSD and that NGSOBSIL were arraigned on Monday and their trial is set for May. There’s not much we can do about the stupidity there.

As for YSD, what, is she sociopathic or something? There are missing pieces there for sure! She is driving around in another car–we don’t know if it’s rented or if she bought it. She hasn’t supported TLG since day one, it’s been DH, me and the father and yet she keeps claiming head-of-household and takes the child deduction. It’s especially maddening because when she did it last year, she said that this year she’d let the father take the deduction–nope, must have misunderstood that one!

Or as DH says: how do you know if YSD is lying? She opens her mouth!

She doesn’t keep us informed about her work schedule or her whereabouts or whether or not she’s arranged for TLG to get picked up or a sitter or what have you. I’ve been documenting it all along but isn’t it a shame it has to be this way? Why can’t she think of TLG’s welfare first above everything else?

The therapist says that YSD exhibits this cluster of behaviors which includes this self-entitlement piece. If she wants something, (like another car) she will lie, cheat and steal to get it and her attitude is, “What do you want me to say?” or “What else was I supposed to do?” She has no empathy for other people, not even for TLG. How can a mother not be in tune with her child?

Thank goodness for the therapist, she’s really helping us a lot!

$54 Ticket for a burned out light bulb

With all the other stuff that goes on around this town, you would think the police would have enough to do than write out $54 tickets for a burned out light bulb on the car. We just had Super Bowl weekend and I understand that the police were out looking for drunk drivers. DS was returning home from work on Friday night and got pulled over. He wasn’t drinking or speeding but he did have a light burned out and so the freaking cop wrote out a ticket.

What happened to the days when the cop would just point it out to you or write a citation and give you so-many days to go to the local station and show them the problem had been fixed? Actually…maybe it’s still that way in places I used to live. The police have better things to do with their time. I guess the township here is looking to scrape up every dollar they can…but certainly not to fix our community roads.

So, fine, now we’ll be more diligent about checking all the lights but what if one burns out from one check-up to the next–even, say, overnight? Just SOL, I guess.

Kodas, Lawyers and one Father’s Day

I was reading CodaDiva’s blog and had a flash of a memory about being put “on the spot” as a kid.  That happens quite frequently to Codas–or did back in the day.  Among Codas and the deaf community, there’s another name for a child–a minor,  I guess–and that is koda.  A kid of a deaf adult.   As for depending on kodas nowadays, I think there’s so much more technology available to deaf parents that maybe they don’t depend as heavily on their kids as mine did on me.  Kodas and can be kids and not little adults these days.

Anyway, it started with Father’s Day.   My dad’s birthday and Father’s Day almost always fell on the same day.  I guess he got “gypped” somewhat the same way people born around Christmas get “gypped” with combination gifts.  I remember buying two separate cards for him, though, just so that wouldn’t happen.  The gift … well, after all, I only had so much money.  His favorite gift was shirts made from terry cloth.  I guess he had a bazillion of them.

My dad certainly wasn’t perfect and had a lot of problems but today is a day to think of his best qualities.  There’s no doubt he loved my brother and me.  We always did fun family stuff on Father’s Day.  He loved Ocean City, too, and so frequently we’d get up very early for the 3 hour drive to the shore.  That was our favorite vacation spot in the world — not that we’d been to too many other places .

One year we went to play miniature golf and he ended up spending the afternoon with me in the emergency room watching my knee get stitched closed.  I was about 12 or 13 that year.  I’d just taken my turn and was moving out of the way for my mother to take hers.  I stumbled to the side and fell, gashing my knee on a hidden jagged pipe.  The grass was a bit overgrown and you couldn’t see the pipe otherwise.  I remember the pain and the sensation of blood running down my leg.

My father went to get the manager of the place.  Now, this wasn’t so easy for him.  Normally, we’d go someplace, have our fun and go just like any normal family.  This time, though, he had to make this hearing man understand that his child had been hurt.  The manager was very flustered and just about beside himself. Normally I would have stepped in to interpret between him and my parents but I couldn’t.  My brother, being the younger kid, had never been called on to interpret before and was equally unable to help.

Once my parents determined that this wasn’t just a little scratch, we took off for the emergency room.  Dad told me to prop my leg up on the back of the front seat, between him and my mom.  There was a hole in the knee of my jeans but I never saw the original wound.  My parents told me not to look.

When the nurses put me in a room to have the stitches, I told them I wanted my dad to stay with me and so one of them went to get him.  His face was very pale but he held my hand and assured me that I would be fine and that it wasn’t such a big deal.  Yeah…but I think now it <i><b>was</i></b> a big deal for him! The doctor tried talking to him but once he realized that dad was deaf he just gave up.  As for me, I stayed calm throughout the whole procedure.

It was the first time in quite a long while that I’d felt safe, cared for and protected.  Later on, though, came the unpleasant on-the-spot stuff:  going to the lawyer.

When I was a koda, there were no professional interpreters for the deaf.  As the oldest, I was the family interpreter.

There are <i>lots</i> of issues with koda interpreters.  Among them:

1.  not having adequate skills (a lot of kodas learned to sign but I didn’t)
2.  not having adult vocabulary, especially the jargon of different professions
3.  emotional involvement (after all, these are your <i>parents</i>)

After my leg healed somewhat, my parents wanted to consult a lawyer.  They felt that the miniature golf course was liable for what happened to me because of negligence:  they should have cut the grass and noticed the broken pipe and fixed it before I got hurt.  They had me make an appointment with a lawyer and I went there with my mom.

I was scared to death.  He intimidated me, an older stern man in a dignified suit.  He used lots of big words that I couldn’t understand.  I explained what happened to me and he began to rip holes in the story, asking me questions that confused me.  He gave me to understand that we didn’t have a case because I must have been careless or messing around when I got hurt.

My mom was furious.  She knew better but was frustrated in that there wasn’t a good enough way for her to fight with this attorney — other than through a scared kid.  She was angry with me, too, and I was very upset by that.  Remember, I was just a little kid and was frightened enough to begin with.  My mom told me I must have told the story wrong and ruined everything.

Looking back now, as an adult, I see how awful it must have been for her, too.  She sat there watching me become flustered.  She didn’t know what was going on because no one told her.  The attorney was too busy confusing me and I was too busy having a meltdown to try and explain what was happening.  I don’t think the attorney and my mother exchanged any written notes at all.  They may have but it was such an awful experience I just blanked most of it out.  Anyway, mom must have been extremely frustrated not to be able to express her own thoughts and feelings.  That happened more often than not with my parents and hearing people.

That’s why, in the late 1970s, interpreting became a profession.  Deaf people needed an impartial person who could interpret for them without making judgments or editing what was said.

What happened to me is why kodas should not ever interpret.

Can We Outlaw Stupidity?

After ranting yesterday about fat discrimination, I happened to see an article at CBS.com and, truthfully, at first I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

Congressman John Gautier of Mississippi had the audacity to introduce a bill to ban restaurants from serving food to fat people.

He says he didn’t mean to offend anyone and that he didn’t think his bill would become a law. He says he filed the bill to make a point, to bring attention to the fact that so many of us are fat…and, I guess, gross to look at in restaurants.

I am sure this bill would be a big hit not only with customers–and whose definition of “obese” would we use?–but with the owners of the restaurants. “Sorry, you’re not allowed to eat here. We can’t take your money. You’re too fat. Go lose 50 pounds and then you can come back.”

Why did that man think he had to make a point about obesity by writing up a bill that would further stigmatize and humiliate us? Like we’re all going to come to our senses and run out and lose all our excess baggage because–doh! We just needed to be reminded or something?

If he’d wanted to make a point, why couldn’t he have done something like introduce a bill to make healthy or organic foods less expensive? Think about it–you go into your grocery store and they’re having a special on potato chips: 2 or 3 for $5.00. And then you go check out the trail mix or the fruit and find out that one little bag is $2.99 and a bag of apples is $3.99. A bag of carrots is $3.99.

Or how about a bill that would tell insurance companies to provide nutritional counseling, weight loss programs and gym memberships for us fat folk who can’t afford it otherwise?

Why didn’t he do that?

It’s because he’s got all those negative fat stereotypes in his head, that’s why. Fat people are gross, lazy, greedy…and we don’t have any feelings. I guess that’s why he was surprised that us fatties were offended.

Read the article? Click here.

Here’s a video from CBS News about it.

Can we make a law against stupid or insensitive congressmen?

More Background Stuff…

It really does feel good to unload some of this stuff.  I was on the phone with my mom–via the relay operator, that is–and she is totally confounded with the computer.  There’s a lot of crazy stuff going on around here at the moment and so I can’t go to help her until the end of this month.  It’s funny how it wasn’t until I was almost an adult that she realized she wanted a better relationship with me.  At first I was too angry and bitter to respond.  Even though I’m having all these issues right now I realize that she just didn’t know how to deal with being a parent and it’s senseless to be angry or bitter about something that wasn’t done to deliberately harm me.

I wrote this stuff a couple of years ago:

When I was a little kid, I thought all parents were deaf. Actually, I probably didn’t give a lot of thought to it at all until I found out that everyone’s parents are not all deaf!

I don’t remember my parents signing outside of the house. They never signed to me or my brother, that’s for sure, and never to my grandmother or other relatives. They used their mouths. I didn’t really notice that people had more trouble understanding my parents than they did anyone else. Everyone seemed equal.  I had a lot to learn!

My parents were born in a time when educators mostly felt that deaf kids should learn to speak — in the times of the Great Depression.  My mom went to an oral school in New York City.  She told me stories about it that would raise your hair on end.  Bottom line, she learned that using her hands to communicate was dirty and something to be ashamed of.  My dad’s school was better — he was allowed to sign.   Why do hearing educators think they know so much about how deaf children should learn?

My dad was born in 1929 to Irish immigrants from County Sligo.  He used to think that he was the 5th child out of 6 but in middle age, he learned that there had been another sibling before he was born.  He was shocked, especially that no one had told him.  I think deaf members of the family don’t get to learn about a lot of family secrets.  It’s very easy to whisper and a little more troublesome to write it out or act it out (if the family doesn’t sign).

My grandparents came to this country sometime before WWI I think.  My knowledge of family history on my dad’s side is very sketchy and some day I need to learn more.  My grandmother became a building super first in Harlem and then (I think) in the Bronx.  I don’t know what my grandfather did except drink and go blind.  I’m sure he must have worked at some trade before glaucoma claimed his sight.  I need to learn more about that too.

My dad isn’t sure why he is deaf.  He remembers being told that he had an operation and the doctor cut through a nerve in his neck.  That can’t be but I’m guessing it must have been a mastoidectomy gone wrong.  I’m sure my grandparents didn’t have much in the way of money and good medical care for the poor in the Depression was probably almost non-existent.

My dad’s family made up home signs to communicate with him.  They tried to include him as much as was possible, which is a lot more than other hearing families of the time did.  When he was old enough, he was sent out of the city to the state supported school for the deaf in White Plains, NY.  He didn’t grow up feeling ashamed to be deaf or to use sign language.  That’s a good thing.

He didn’t have a great life though.  He doesn’t talk about his childhood but there was a lot of drinking and violence going on around him, in his own family and in the neighborhood.  I think he just wanted to forget about it.  Anytime I asked him about it, he’d just say it was all over and in the past.

My mom was a full term baby but she was so tiny, she could fit into the palm of a neighbor’s hand.  Mrs. C, who was my grandmother’s close friend for years and years, often liked to tell the story of how she could hold my newborn mom is just one hand.  Babies born in 1930 were just tinier than they are now, that’s for sure!

My mom was the youngest of six, four brothers and two sisters — just like my dad’s family.  In his family, the two girls came first and then the four boys.  In my mom’s family, it was the other way around.  My mom and her sister were the two youngest — and the only deaf members of the family.

When my grandma married my grandfather, she didn’t know there was a history of deafness in his family.  I read in her diary that if she’d known, she wouldn’t have married him.  She deeply grieved the fact that both her daughters were deaf.  My aunt was born deaf but my mom can remember listening to the radio and dancing to the music.  She lost the rest of her hearing before she was 4.  The youngest of the 4 brothers became his sisters’ interpreter (I called “Uncle Bone Squisher” because of his tight hugs) but eventually they had to be sent away to school.

The family wasn’t wealthy by any means but I guess they were as refined as they could be, thanks to my grandmother.  Her family had been in the U.S. since the Revolutionary War — well, even before then in one branch of the family.  That member of the family was smuggled out of France in an empty wine cask by his two brothers.  The young man was a Protestant in Huguenot France and his brothers wanted to save his life.  Descendants of his fought in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and my great-grandfather was a light housekeeper.  I always thought that was so cool.

My grandfather immigrated from Norway sometime before WWI.  I have a picture of my grandparents when they were very young, posing on the beach at Coney Island.  I can’t imagine how it was my grandmother fell in love with him but … something like that must have happened.  He was a stern, cold man that scared me.  I didn’t like to be near him.

Although he was never violent with me, I must have sensed something that made me uneasy.  After my grandmother died, I found her diary and read it.  My grandfather used to beat his family and I felt sick to my stomach at the description of him pounding my mother’s head against the wall.  My grandfather would attack grandma and my uncles would jump him to stop it … it sounds awful.

My mother and my aunt were sent to a school for the deaf in NYC.  At that time, the school followed the oral method which has nothing to do with sex here.  It meant that the deaf children were not allowed to use their hands and were forced to speak and lipread only.  Their teaching methods and the advice they gave my mom’s family probably stigmatized the girls and messed up their thinking for almost a lifetime.

I know a little bit more about Mom’s education and childhood because she was more willingly to talk about her experiences with me.  Some of the stories she told me are just awful but I’m glad she shared them.

She and her older sister were sent to That School when she was around kindergarten age.  I’m thinking that would be the mid 1930s.  <u>Look</u> magazine did a spread on That School and took pictures of students trying to learn speech.  There were a couple of pictures of my mom, a beautiful platinum blonde child with her hands on some kind of instrument that vibrated.  There was another picture of her with headphones over her ears.

I thought it was pretty cool that my mom and aunt would be in a magazine like <u>Look</u> and it looked like they were having fun — but I found out that it wasn’t fun and games.  It was very boring and tedious for mom.  Hour after hour, day after day she had to put her hands and fingers on the throats and lips of hearing teachers to try and learn how to make sounds.  Day after day and hour after hour, she had to practice saying the same word over and over until she got it right.

Ball ball ball ball ball ball ball ball ball ball ball ball ball ball ball ball.

Definitely not fun!

Why would someone subject a child to that kind of torture?

It all has to do with how hearing educators thought deaf kids should be taught.

Some of the earliest schools for the deaf recognized the importance of sign language.  It was so much easier to teach the kids — it makes sense, right?  And these kids would become literate as they grew up and some became teachers themselves — wonderful role models!  A deaf community and culture grew — kind of like when immigrants arrived from Ireland and Germany and Eastern Europe.  The immigrants settled into neighborhoods, had a common language and culture and mores.  It’s the same with the deaf community.  At the same time, the communities interact with the larger population.  No big deal right?

That School came into existence well over 100 years ago.    Unlike the earliest schools, the teachers and administrators didn’t use sign language for instruction.  By then, there was a new theory of education, called oralism, and it was strongly supported by Alexander Graham Bell, whose wife & mother were deaf or hard of hearing.  The idea was that using sign language would prevent a  deaf child from learning how to speak.  That would be a horrible thing because, after all, most of the world is hearing.

That’s why my mom wasn’t allowed to learn sign language and that’s why she had to sit for hours repeating sounds and words that made no sense to her.  Not only was she not allowed to sign, she also wasn’t allowed to gesture — even naturally, like to point at something.

Mom told me that she was sitting at the dinner table and wanted some butter.  Everyone’s faces were turned away as the kids were forced to mouth words to each other.  She reached out to touch her neighbor’s shoulder so that she could get her attention — and the counselor smacked her for it.  Mom learned it was wrong to gesture like that … what she was supposed to do was nod her head up and down until she got someone’s attention and then ask for what she wanted.  I would like to know what the difference is between jigging up and down like a bobble head doll and tapping someone on the shoulder.  I guess the difference was that the hands were just verboten.

The girls (That School was for girls only after one of the primary ages — the boys were sent to another school) learned that using their hands to communicate was dirty and shameful and not to be done in public.  Mom tells me that she and her sister used to go to the bathroom to “talk” and that they had to hurry so they wouldn’t be caught.  They weren’t the only kids to do that, either.  It was never acknowledged.

The counselors and teachers were always preaching to my grandmother and family that they absolutely should not sign, not ever ever and they should immediately prevent the girls from using their hands.  Grandma & family got warned:  if you let the girls use their hands, they will never learn to speak.  They will never be able to get along in the hearing world.

Since those days, That School’s philosophy has changed.  Now they use total communication — sign language and lip reading/speech reading skills.  They didn’t change soon enough for my mom and aunt.  To this day, my mother is not comfortable signing in public.

Don’t Want No Fat People ‘Round Here…

I called my OVR counselor today and made an appointment to see her. I want to check into the possibilities of working from home–typing of some kind. She said, “Oh, you’re not interested in working in the community?”

It’s not that. I am interested but I don’t think I’ll get hired because I’m fat and over fifty. When I say that, I’m not being down on myself. It’s a prevailing attitude and that’s where the title of my post comes from. It’s a take off of the old Randy Newman song called “Short People.” The lyrics are full of negative stereotypes about the vertically challenged–heh, how’s that for politically correct? Before you think that he’s bigoted against short people, though, he’s got a stanza that goes “short people are just the same as you and me…” In other words, we get these bad ideas into our heads about people who are different.

Don’t kid yourself, big people are discriminated against. Some of the stereotypes are that we are fat because we’re lazy, that we are slobs, not very bright, not very dependable, greedy, dishonest, unattractive, disgusting and on and on and on. If you are really big, people stare at you. Kids laugh. Getting into and out of chairs with arms can be very embarrassing.

About 10 years ago, I was 50 or so pounds overweight. I was a skilled interpreter and held the highest certification in my profession. I had years of experience. As I became more and more disabled, I began looking into coordinating positions so that I wouldn’t have to sign so much. I always did well in the interviews and everyone seemed to like me but I never did get a coordinator’s position. It may have been my age but I suspect it was more likely that I didn’t “look” the part.

So why don’t we fat people just get up off our lazy butts and lose weight if we don’t want to deal with discrimination?

It’s not that we are lazy or stuck on our butts. For my part although, yes, I do occasionally overeat I don’t make it a habit. I eat mostly fruit and vegetables. Before I injured my ankle I was walking 2 miles everyday–fast–and when I couldn’t do that, I was walking on a treadmill. I am still big. My grandmother was big and so is my aunt and my cousins.

I don’t like it when people see me as stereotype and not as the person I am. The thing is, I forget I am fat most of the time. I see myself as intelligent and curious, caring and loving. I’m a happily remarried widow, a mom, a nana who can still climb around on a playground set after a grandchild, a bookaholic, a cat lover, a writer, and lots of other things. I don’t feel fat until I walk into an interview and I see a group of skinny women with that look on their faces. You know, the one that says oh my, she’s so big! And I think that’s all the see.

So that’s why I want to work from home.

Where did it all begin?

Did the cycle of abuse start with my grandfather? Or maybe he, himself, was abused and neglected as a child. I don’t know many details of my grandparents’ lives. I don’t even know all that much about my own parents. What I do know is this:

My mother was not born deaf, although she seemed to have some hearing impairment. My mother can remember that she used to hear music on the radio and danced to it. She got very sick when she was a baby, maybe around 3 years old, and after that she couldn’t hear anymore. Her older sister was born deaf.

Her father, my fierce Norwegian grandfather, was physically abusive to his children and his wife. My grandmother wondered why she’d been cursed so that both her beautiful little girls were profoundly deaf. Later, she found out that my grandfather’s two sisters were deaf–he’d never told her. When he died, she felt she’d been freed. These were things I read in her diary after she died in 1980. My mother remembers the abuse; my aunt doesn’t.

My father was the sixth of 7 children born to an Irish immigrant couple. He doesn’t know why heis deaf. His family told him it was because a doctor “cut” his “neck” and severed a nerve. That sounds like a mastoidectomy to me. I don’t think he lost his hearing from that. The etiology is unknown but that’s the way it is for a lot of deaf folks his age. My grandfather was blinded by glaucoma and he was an alcoholic. In fact, almost everyone in my father’s family is either alcoholic or has some kind of anxiety disorder. Maybe there’s bipolar disorder in that side of the family too. I wouldn’t be surprised.

I was born six days before Christmas. My mother was sent home with me on Christmas Eve and everyone was busy with preparations for the holiday. My mom says she didn’t know what to do with me and just cried and cried because no one helped her. She wasn’t the only one who cried around the clock. Apparently I was a difficult baby and cried all the time.

I don’t think that my parents set out to screw me up, make me miserable, fat, anxious or depressed. I think they had the best intentions. They just didn’t know much about parenting and their role models probably weren’t the best–if they existed at all.

See, deaf kids in those days–the 1930s–were sent to special schools usually located hours away. The kids stayed at the school from Monday-Friday at the very minimum and went home on weekends. Some, like my mom and my aunt, stayed at school all year and went home only for Christmas, Easter and summer holidays. I’m not sure about my dad…he doesn’t like to talk about his childhood at all. Anyway, when you live away from home most of the time who do you learn parenting skills from?

My mom went to a repressive school in New York City. Well–I suppose they wouldn’t say they were repressive. They were just following the philosophy of deaf education for those times and that was oralism. Sign language was strictly forbidden. Kids had their hands smacked for gesturing. Signing was reserved for under the table–if you could get away with it–or the bathroom or some other place out of sight. The teachers and the counselors were not warm touchy feely people. No wonder my mother didn’t know how to be a mother.

More later…