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…

~ by lostkitty on February 4, 2008.