Tishia’s Thoughts

I will try my best to answer the often-asked question of what it is like to be the sole deaf person in my family, my social circles, and my church community and how it affects the way I interact with my family. I do have a distant cousin who married someone who has a deaf half-brother, James Mathis, but… that isn’t what I mean by family. I am the only deaf person in the extended family, meaning my dad’s side of all the Grimes children (to my 3^rd cousins) and my mom’s side of all the Wilhelm and Turbyfill children, to my 3^rd cousins again. There is only one deaf person in this vast family, my aunt alone has eleven children and my mother is the only one to have an only child. It is a big family. Only my father bothered to learn to talk to me. Oh, and my cousin Matt, but he died when we were kids.

As a child, it was easier. My cousins all could just tap me, point at the tree, and off we ran to climb. Gestures got us all by when we were at that age we only wanted to play and roughhouse. It’s when I hit my tween years things started to get crazy. Long story short, my father was, um, sent away for a little bit and I lost the only person willing to listen to me and the rest of my family did not feel comfortable with me and my deafness. So off I went.

I married a hearing man and gained a wonderful family for my in-laws and again I find myself being the only deaf person in a family. All my children are hearing (Praise the Lord!) and my husband’s extended families are all hearing. When they met me they seemed to feel awkward- “Oh, she’s deaf. Oh, um, Hi!” I do not fault them for feeling the way they did. It’s normal and understandable. I am sure if my sister married a blind man, I would be taken aback for a bit then bounce right back and introduce myself the best way I can think of how to introduce myself.

I joined a church in which I am the sole deaf person and I find myself wondering if maybe I should try finding another church with more deaf people. I feel so conflicted. I love my church family, they gave me baby showers, watched my babies grow up, held my hand when discovering about my son’s medical condition, and tried their best to help me find the resources I needed access to. As hard as they try, they aren’t meeting my needs. I’m seriously considering visiting the deaf church and ignoring a certain few deaf people and trying to acclimate myself into the culture. Eventually, someone will get to know me and decide I’m deaf enough, won’t they?

Anyways, now that you have the background on my er… what’s the right word… how my deafness affects my community and my family. Now that you understand just how isolated I am, I will now try to answer the question of what it is like to be a deaf mother of hearing children.

I am constantly keeping my eyes on the baby and I try to arrange the house so that I have safe spots to place my children in for when I need to be alone. Like we do not have rugs so I can feel the vibrations more, I hang pictures on short nails so that a big crash would knock them down and alert me to the crash, and I keep my babies in my bedroom with me as we sleep. They have their own beds, but both are jammed against our bed so they can crawl into our bed if they need to let me know they need something. My life as a deaf wife and parent means I do things differently and there are hearing people that think I am not doing things safely their way. Hearing people don’t get it that deaf people have a hyper-sensitive touch to make up for our deafness. What seems unsafe for hearing people are improvised techniques to make the lives of deaf people safer and more productive.

During the days, I watch them like a hawk. I carefully pay attention for any signs that my children are choking as they eat, I constantly check on them, every little bump I feel makes me jump up to see if one of them fell, and if their back is to me and they’re moving funny I quickly go over there so I can see their faces to see if they’re crying or just exploring the ways they can make their bodies move. Babies can move the same ways coughing and laughing and sometimes the only way to tell is to put my hands on their chests and feeling the vibrations or turning them around to see their faces. Driving is another thing to conquer. Once my children are strapped in the car, they are essentially isolated. They are on their own, because as I drive I am busy focusing on traffic conditions. If they cry out, I won’t respond. There isn’t any way I can make ways to adjust for this one- it’s just how it will have to be. Car time is momma “turned off” time, whereas in hearing families, car time is a prime opportunity for mothers to have heart-to-heart chats with their children. I am jealous I miss out on that aspect of parenting.

I am in a complicated situation. My son has epilepsy. That’s a medical condition where one has seizures- which is a misfiring of the brain causing the body to jerk or the eyes to flick around and the mouth hanging open. My son suffers from nocturnal mylonic jerking seizures, which can look exactly like simply tossing and turning. You can tell the difference by listening to their breathing… aha, see the dilemma I find myself in? So I press my cheek to his chest and try to determine he is in a slow rhythmical dream-state or if he is indeed having shallow breathing and in the middle of a seizure. It is hard. Really hard. He needs his sleep, but if he is having a seizure he needs his medication immediately. So which is it? It is really hard to make a judgment call based on sound when you can’t hear it. My son also has absence seizures, where you stare into space and it looks like daydreaming. You listen for the difference, which would be his jaw grinding or his throat gurgling… and yes, there we go again with not being able to hear. I improvise by first calling his name out and when he is still nonresponsive, I feel his throat and watch his eyes carefully for the tell-tale flickering. Then I go get the medication. My husband is able to just listen to him from across the room and say ‘no, he’s just daydreaming’ or “yes, he is in one, time it.’ This is a situation that I find my deafness really gets in the way of.

I also worry about being able to teach them to speak because my son is delayed due to his seizures. This is why he will be in speech therapy and I try to expose him to as many hearing gatherings as I can, even though I feel like a fish out of water at these. I do it for my son. It hurts when others imply that I cannot communicate with my children. No… I cannot teach my children spoken English as well as the hearing community could, but I am able to communicate with my children. My daughter is starting to babble with her hands in addition to with her mouth and voice, but she never does both at the same time. This shows she understands these are two separate languages. We aren’t doing “Baby Signs”, we are raising my children to be bilingual. They will know both spoken English and sign English/ASL. My son will tell me he wants to kiss me by slapping his cheek- which is his own way of signing “kiss”. He does not vocalize kiss when doing this gesture. Yet when he asks his father for a kiss, he will say “Ki, ki” without the gesturing. He understands at some level that these are two languages, not two ways to say the same thing. My daughter does the same thing. She will razz at her father, but she squeals and shakes her fists excitedly at me. My children and I communicate just fine.

What it means to be a deaf mother of hearing children is that I listen with my eyes and my touch when it comes to environment/nature and I listen with my heart and soul when it comes to interaction/nurturing them. Whether or not we like it- I, along with many other deaf mommas, are on our own within our communities.