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.

~ by lostkitty on February 6, 2008.