Deaf Like Me

“DEAF! The word hit me with unexpected force, as if someone had hurled an iron bar through a plate-glass window, shattering the protective screen of explanations I had erected for Lynn’s perplexing lack of response to sound.”

The idea of deafness shatters Tom’s preconceived ideas about who Lynn is and what her life will be like. The word “deaf” is not merely a description to Tom; it is an act of violence that disrupts his hope of a “normal” family.

“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. Just because Lynn doesn’t act exactly as Bruce did, we can’t jump to conclusions all the time. Kids are all different.”

Tom and Louise try to calm their worries about Lynn by explaining away the signs of her deafness. This is partly driven by fear, as well as their Obsession with “Normal.” They put off confronting reality because they know that it would drastically change their lives to admit that Lynn is deaf.

“If only we had known someone to talk to, someone who had known a deaf baby. Was Lynn one in a million? Were there other parents somewhere who had struggled with these same perplexing questions? We didn’t even know where to start looking for such parents.”

Tom and Louise are so isolated from the Deaf community that they have no way of knowing if Lynn’s situation is uncommon or not. Though they intuitively recognize The Importance of the Deaf Community, they make no effort to research it further.

“The first stage of language learning passed before we knew anything about it. It was as if Lynn had climbed the first step on the stairway to language, stood for a while, then stepped quietly down while we continued to wonder if she was really deaf.”

Tom’s observation here highlights the importance of teaching d/Deaf children sign language from birth. Without any auditory input, which is how hearing children begin to learn language, deaf children like Lynn often miss critical stages of language development. In the 1960s and earlier, when ASL was widely shunned, many deaf children spent years without a language, if they ever learned one at all.

“The most important thing is to treat her like a normal child. Talk to her all the time just as if she can hear you. When you talk, look at her and try to make sure she can see you. Talk as often as you can.”

The advice that Tom and Louise are given is misleading, as the oralist approach is much more concerned with children appearing “normal” than it is with giving children an accessible method of communication. Tom and Louise are similarly preoccupied with their obsession with “normal” and jump at the chance to treat Lynn as though she can hear, ignoring the obvious fact that d/Deaf children do require different treatment.

“And we knew that if we depended on gestures to communicate it would constantly call attention to Lynn’s handicap. It would mark her as deaf. It could even isolate her from us into the world of other deaf people who could not speak.”

Once again, Tom and Louise’s obsession with “normal” colors the way they decide to approach Lynn’s education. Rather than teach Lynn sign language so that they can properly communicate with her, they would rather Lynn take on the practically impossible task of learning to lip read and speak with no auditory input, just so that she can appear to be “normal.”

“‘Her hearing will probably improve with a hearing aid.’ We didn’t want them to feel sorry, to pity us, to view Lynn like a handicapped child. We had read that if we treated her like a deaf child, she might take on the characteristics of those isolated individuals we thought of as deaf-and-dumb.”

Tom and Louise hold ableist prejudices that connect disability to shame and embarrassment. Societal prejudices have shaped the way they think about disabled people, which in turn feeds into how they think people will perceive them as the parents of a deaf child. This reinforces their idea that there is something wrong with being deaf.

“Yet we knew that any practice would eventually bring results. Someday she would begin to recognize sounds. Someday she would see their connection to the words she saw on our lips. Someday she would talk to us.”

The Challenges of Oralism become apparent when Tom and Louise start using the auditory trainer with Lynn. The trainer is meant to “stimulate” Lynn’s “residual” hearing, though the mechanism behind this remains ambiguous. The oralist method gives them little advice other than to wait and see what happens.

“The speaker then emphasized that speech was the birthright of every child. But that was only one reason we must begin teaching hearing-impaired children as early as possible.”

The idea that speech is the “birthright of every child” is deeply rooted in ableism, as it prioritizes spoken language over other communication methods. As the d/Deaf community argues, a more accurate statement would be that communication is the birthright of every child. In prioritizing speech over sign language, the oralist approach actually robs deaf children of their right to communicate.

“Then I wondered how the deaf had lived in his time. Had they gone to school? Had there been any deaf children in this little farm town? Was Lynn the first Spradley born without hearing? Probably not.”

Tom takes an important step in coming to terms with Lynn’s deafness by acknowledging that Lynn is probably not the first person in his family to be deaf. Though he still has no contact with the Deaf community around him, this moment helps him normalize Lynn’s experience. He comes to see that Lynn is not an anomaly or an aberration.

“A sense of sadness filled the cool evening air around us, sadness mixed with hope. Someday she would speak. She would not be alone.”

Tom and Louise hold onto the hope that one day, all their efforts to teach Lynn to speak will be worth it. They attach Lynn’s ability to speak to her sense of community; if she can speak, she will not be isolated. They do not think about how isolating it must be for Lynn in the meantime, without any ability to communicate her complex feelings and needs to her parents.

“Lip reading allowed us to talk to Lynn in only the most limited ways. She couldn’t communicate with us at all. She couldn’t ask questions. She couldn’t tell us how she felt. She couldn’t tell us what had happened outside when she came in crying. She couldn’t tell us where she wanted to go, what she wanted to do.”

Lynn is only able to lip read a few words. While this does allow Tom and Louise to communicate with her in a limited fashion, she has no way of communicating clearly herself. The irony here is that had she been taught sign language from birth; she would be able to communicate all these things with her parents. Despite the fact that Tom realizes this, it still takes him years to see the benefits of sign language.

“But in a sense, the children there were not like Lynn. Out of such schools, we had heard, came the manual deaf adults, the ones who couldn’t communicate with the rest of society.”

The oral approach places immense importance on deaf children being taught to appear “normal.” What Tom does not realize here is that manual Deaf adults (Deaf adults who use sign language), can in fact communicate with the rest of society, if the rest of society is willing to learn sign language or use interpreters to facilitate translation.

“If there was only some way to explain about school, some way for Mrs. Park to talk to her, to say her name, to remind her that I’ll return! Or if she could talk to the other kids. I think she just feels terribly alone and isolated.”

Once again, Tom and Louise demonstrate moments of near-awareness that there must be a better way to communicate with deaf children. They recognize how terribly isolated Lynn is but still do not consider ASL a reasonable option.

“Communication! That’s what we had been denied. An uncontrollable anger welled up within me. We had been cheated—it wasn’t fair! Why? Why? Why?”

In the face of being unable to tell his sick child what is happening to her, Tom is helpless. He is on the path to realizing that he cannot communicate with his child because the societal obsession with “normal” has privileged spoken language over ASL.

“If your children knew sign language, they could easily grasp what you or their teachers wanted to communicate. Of course, you would have to learn sign language first. But is that too much to ask of parents with deaf children and professionals who work with the deaf? Most of your children who are deaf will need sign language to help them get an education. And sign language will help their speech too. And it won’t put them in the ‘deaf ghetto,’ wherever that is.”

Jim Hudson’s treatise on the importance of ASL is what finally gets through to Tom. This is the first time he has heard a Deaf adult’s perspective; for years he has relied upon advice and expertise from people who do not actually have much contact with the Deaf community. Tom eventually realizes the importance of the Deaf community for d/Deaf people as well as hearing parents of d/Deaf children.

“Somehow, actually seeing this deaf person speak and sign at the same time showed us possibilities we had ruled out. For the first time we saw how important signs were to people like Jim and Alice. lt was another language.”

Jim and Alice are able to demonstrate for Tom and Louise that ASL is a complete language. After years of believing that sign language was inferior to spoken language because of prejudice against the Deaf community, they are finally able to see the truth.

“Why hadn’t we asked them of ourselves? Was our concern about Lynn’s speech blinding us to something more important—communication?”

Tom confronts his own prejudices and realizes that his obsession with “normal” had caused him to ignore his daughter’s needs. He and Louise, like many hearing parents of deaf children, had prioritized their own comfort over Lynn’s ability to communicate.

“We both felt the excitement of discovery, a new sense of relief, but still a mixture of doubts and even anger. It seemed as if everything we had believed, the things we had worked for, our hopes and dreams for Lynn, had all begun to crumble. Why hadn’t we seen these studies earlier?”

Tom confronts the reality that oralism has been detrimental to Lynn’s development. There is a harsh irony in his despair, as he did not actively seek out different opinions about how to teach Lynn language, even when faced with the challenges of oralism. He is partly to blame for prioritizing oralism when it was clearly not working.

“Of all the injuries that oralism had inflicted on Lynn, the most insidious had been to rob her of a name. We had unwittingly told her, ‘You are not a person until you can see ‘Lynn’ on our lips, until you can say ‘Lynn’ with your voice. We will accept no substitutes.’”

Tom realizes that Lynn has never known her own name, which robbed her of the ability to define herself on her own terms in her own language. Ableism against d/Deaf people equates personhood with the ability to speak. Tom and Louise must move past this assumption to properly support their daughter.

“She didn’t need to point or plead. She didn’t have to search through cupboards and drawers. She didn’t have to run through the house holding up first one thing, then another. She didn’t have to struggle to interpret garbled sounds. Lynn’s hands spoke with unmistakable clarity.”

When Lynn begins to learn ASL, Tom and Louise are astounded by the depth of communication that they are finally able to have with their daughter. Sign language finally lets Lynn participate in the world around her in a way that she was never able to before.

“We had placed the entire responsibility for successful communication on the shoulders of a three-year-old. The one member of our family with the least ability to accept such a responsibility. The schools had done the same.”

Tom takes responsibility for his role in making it harder for Lynn to communicate effectively. Even as a baby, Lynn was expected to hide her disability and conform to her hearing family’s standards of language communication without the proper support, and without her parents having to learn a new language.

“But accepting Lynn meant more than communicating in her language, more than hoping that someday she might learn ours and become bilingual. It meant a personal involvement in that world which would surely become hers in the future—the world of deaf people.”

Tom recognizes that he and Louise have the responsibility to learn about and interact with the Deaf community. They must learn about the Deaf world to better understand their daughter and the unique challenges she will face as a Deaf person in a hearing world. Rather than expect her to conform to the hearing world, they must make the effort to integrate the Deaf and hearing world and ensure that Lynn has every opportunity to live life to the fullest.