“Let the child lead

the way”
DRAFT
A Remembering
Mariah of
Drove to Canada:
Growing Up Deaf
A Song in 14 Movements

Clipper Press
www.drmstream.com
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 When You Grow Up Deaf

When you grow up deaf there are so many things you don't
know.
The sound of rain on the roof.
The roar of waves as they crest, their agony as they crash.
The huffing sound of someone running behind you.
The scraping sound your nails make as you scratch your
neck.
The brisk snapping of gum.
The clanking ring of an old rotary phone.
How hard typewriter keys slap the paper against the
platen.
The crinkle of cellophane and the crunching of paper when
you crush them in your hand.
The rattle of branches and the flapping of leaves when the
wind comes up.
The gentle whisper of your own sigh.
When you grow up deaf you worry that you'll never really
know the world, that every moment your back is turned
something irreplaceable will pass you by. When you close
your eyes, silence.

When I published this short prose poem on my web site, drmstream, I

had several readers chastise me for offering an incomplete and unhelpful
picture of a difficult experience. The assumption, given that I primarily
write fiction and often share sketches of different characters, was that I
had imagined the experience.

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 I wondered where these readers had come from. This was the first
time that I had gotten such personal, negative feedback to a sketch.
Checking my log files, I discovered something sobering: When you type
“how hard it is to grow up deaf” into Google, my prose poem When you
grow up deaf was the first resource returned by the search engine.
Someone typing in that search string probably isn’t looking for
literary-minded prose poems. They are looking, I imagine, for tangible
information that can help to allay the confusion and fear of raising a child
that can not hear. My piece, as vivid as it is, would only intensify the
searcher’s sense of what it is like inside their child’s silent world, and
could increase the feeling of helplessness that afflicts the parents of
impaired children.
I wasn’t imaging when I wrote those lines. I know.
I grew up deaf.
I wasn’t profoundly deaf. Just like sight or mental functioning, there
are degrees of hearing loss, and while the most profound loss most easily
defines the condition, the experience of growing up with a high degree of
impairment of one of your critical faculties is challenging and confusing.
I have one word of guidance to parents of an impaired child.
Let the child lead the way.
I did not get hearing aids until I was 18 years old and going off to
college. I grew up in a big family of meagre circumstance, and even with
80% loss of hearing, I didn’t qualify as the most handicapped one of the
group. One of my sisters is profoundly retarded. She didn’t learn to walk
until she was six, she needed constant supervision and she combined the
mental faculties of a two-year old with the hormonal momentum of an
emerging adult..

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 What was it like to grow
up without being able to hear?
When you are given the space
to become part of the group,
to hang out with kids in the
neighborhood, to make your
way through school, to create
the identity that you want, you
find ways to adapt and
conform.
You watch the world
closely. You mimic what you
can. You gravitate to close
relationships. You have to
dominate a group conversation because you can’t follow the fast back and
forth. Some kids think you’re weird. Some kids get it and try to watch
out for you. You read. You work with your hands. You feel on the
outside. When you run track you have to compensate for starting a split
second after everyone else because you don’t know whether the gun went
off or not.
You sit in the hearing booth and listen for the bloops and beeps and
hums of the testing tones and wonder whether you’re getting better. You
drive through a neighborhood with a Caution Deaf Child road sign and
worry that you’ll have that put up on your street and be branded as an
outcast.
What can you do when you are this parent’s child? My mother had the
philosophy of maximum information and minimum intervention. When I
started a new year at school, she would go talk to all my teachers and tell
them that I had bad hearing. She would encourage me to sit in the front
of the class. She’d ask the teachers to make sure that I got each day’s
assignment.
Then she would get out of the way.
I would sit in the back of the class. That’s where my friends sat. I’d
start missing homework and doing poorly on tests. She would go talk to
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the teacher. And the next day, I’d discover I’d been moved up to the
front.
Her instinct was to let me learn myself what I needed to do to adapt.
She knew that I was going to make mistakes.
There were a few times when she intervened quickly and demanded
resources and attention for me. In second grade, I was so unresponsive
to verbal cues that they determined that I was mentally handicapped and
moved me out of my classroom into a remedial group. My mother
marched into school and excoriated them: he’s smart, he’s just deaf!
She demanded speech therapy to alleviate my lisp, she insisted that the
teacher in my second grade classroom take the time that I knew what
work there was to do, and
she watched them like a hawk
to make sure they delivered
on their promise.
The second time she
intervened was when I went
to college. She worked with
the state rehabilitation arm in
Rhode Island to get me free
hearing aids. She also
convinced them to give me a
scholarship to go study in
New York. Her reasoning
was simple: you’ve been able
to get through life so far
because you were able to create small situations for your interactions;
when you go to college, you’re going to be in large groups that are out of
your control, so you need to have better tools.
The day I got the hearing aids was the day that I realized what you
didn’t know when you grew up deaf. The doctor crumpled a sheet of
paper in his hands and my head throbbed. The phone rang and I jumped
out of the seat. My clothing made swishing noises when it brushed
together. For the next part of my life, I learned what it meant to be a

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hearing person. I discovered what my talents were. I went through an
education in relating to others. And I moved into life with my handicap
ameliorated by micro-circuitry and plastic cases that I put into my ears
each morning and took out each night. It was...and still is...a miracle.
But you never stop being deaf, even when you have the tools to help
you offset it. When I take out my hearing aids, I drift into a world of
silence. It is a familiar and comforting world, where I am not hyper-alert
and vigilant. It is the world that I know from when I was a child.
This is a vivid memory. I was standing with my bike on the country
road we lived on. I’m with a couple of other kids from the neighborhood.
We’re planning where we are going to go. I’m watching their lips,
picking up a word here and there, and piecing it all together. We climb
onto our bikes, about to head off. In that moment when your bike is still
and you are balanced on the pedal starting to push off, I looked up at the
trees. They were green and full. They were waving around wildly. I saw
the motion, felt the sensation and heard nothing.
My mother gave me the space to find myself and stayed present so she
could make sure the world gave me that space back. She didn’t try to
protect me. She let me take the flute and play in the school band -- badly
-- without telling me that it was folly. She let me go ride my bike on the
busy town road, but only after having my friends swear they would ride in
front and behind me. She let me sit close to the television so I could hear
the dialogue without telling me that I was going to go blind.
Still, she was the mother of a child who was missing great patches of
experience. She was the mother of a mentally-retarded child. She looked
at these misfortunes and asked herself, What have I done wrong?
What I wish I could have told her then is that we were all right. And
that when she saw me sitting in mute and still, reading for hours or staring
out the window, or tinkering with an old radio, that I was inside the
richest and most magnificent place that I could possibly experience, my
imagination. Her choice to give me as much of life as I could handle may
have been painful to witness, but it was a profound gift and an act of
courage.

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