The Second to the Last Word on Deafness

By Leeanne Seaver, H&V, Headquarters © 2020

I don’t remember these notes, but there they are in my handwriting, neater back then than it is now. There are so many differences between who is reading them today and who I was more than 25 years ago writing with such earnestness, bulleting points and underlining what seemed most important:

• Make everything meaningful, relevant, interesting, interactive, vivid.
• Precede as if he hears everything and nothing at the same time.
• Check the equipment, then check to make sure everybody else is checking the equipment.
• Find him friends who are deaf. Find him friends who are hearing.
• Use this version of sign. Use that version of sign. Use Cues. Combine.
• Do not compromise. Be committed. Change your mind at the right time.
• Let him lead (trust that you’ll know that when you see it).

There are pages and pages full of what everyone said I must do so my little boy (profoundly deaf/late identified/communication-deprived) could develop a language he couldn’t hear. There were workshops, parent meetings, speech therapy sessions, sign language videos, audiology appointments, books to read, conferences, and school observations. So much time had been lost, such urgency . . . not a minute to be wasted that could provide a teachable moment.

So I became that mom—not even the walks we took as just walks. They were “language labs.” In a spiral notebook, I recorded his every sound or attempt at a word at age four—and what he meant (as far as I could tell) next to it:

walk walk walk:  “Let’s keep walking”

car: (he saw a tire track in the mud)

there flower: “Let’s go look for flowers over there”

ga’way:  “The flowers that grew here are gone”

kwirl went up,  kwirl: “The body of a dead squirrel that was here yesterday is gone now”

yee bah: (he kept saying this, no idea)

ohhhhh bugs: “Here’s a whole nest of bugs I’ve uncovered”

sharp?: “Is that a mosquito with its pointy nose”

Dane bug: “That bug is mine”

F’ye -oot:  (no idea what this means?)

Tonight, I turn the pages of these old notebooks and wonder how I made tying shoelaces interesting; how I made cartoons meaningful (considering there were no captions back then); how I made current events relevant; and just exactly how did I make a dead squirrel so vivid?

Going through boxes full of the artifacts from those early years, my handwriting connects me to my own experience. I time-travel on a cursive slope back to what I was feeling, and that was the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough, wasn’t doing it right, and everybody was surely rolling their eyes at such a poser. How I wish I could put my arms around that scared, wobbly version of me who was trying so hard. I feel such compassion for her. I want to go back and tell her it’s all going to be ok because it was.

So if the last word on deafness is “ok,” then the second to the last word is to “be.” I wish I had spent more time being with Dane, not as a language cop or spinning top of anxiety, but just his mommy. I want to tell her it was ok to leave the hearing aids in the glove compartment of the car when we went to the beach . . . that it was ok to disagree with the “experts” when their advice didn’t feel right in my gut, and that there are lots of things more important than producing the ‘s’ sound. I wish I knew I was good enough. The closest I can come to that now is to say this to you right now—as if our hands were clasped together and our eyes looking straight into one another’s souls—You are good enough. You got this. It’s all going to be ok.

H&V Communicator – Spring 2020