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.

~ by lostkitty on February 5, 2008.