Adversity and Character

Being deaf is hard.  When we were considering a Cochlear Implant I asked the hearing wife of a deaf man what she thought of it.  She said that life is easier when you can hear.  As parents we want to make life easier for our children.  This doesn't actually make any sense because everyone we celebrate and admire went through and overcame adversity.  We fear that our children will never learn to be polite, grateful or independent.  But then we try and give them the world because it makes us feel like we're great parents if we do.

For the first 5 years of my son's life he could communicate with 7 people.  Mom, Dad, speech therapist, audiologist, 2 children at the school, and his baby sister.  Conspicuously absent from this list are all of the other people who loved him but didn't learn to sign.  Grandparents, aunts, uncles, our friends, their children, people at church...  This was so hard for me, but it was good for our family.  Because we didn't have family and friends signing with our deaf child, it was easier to move away from those family and friends, to find people that could.

I sometimes hear parents talk about why their child doesn't like an activity that makes them uncomfortable.  Sometimes that is the reason they don't sign.  They don't like being uncomfortable.  Or, this one is great, the only reason they would learn to sign is for our son, and so they don't.  Nothing says "Love ya!" like literally saying your child is not worth their effort.  Some people say they would have learned sign if it were someone in their own family.  But our experience with our own family suggests that some people are going to learn sign whether they have a family member or not, and that most other people aren't going to learn sign, loved one or no.

My son has the best attitude.  Because all he has ever known is exclusion and being an outsider, he doesn't get down about that.  Because every day he has people stare at him and not able to understand him, he rolls with it.  At cub scout camp he was the only boy willing to get up and sing with the cub master.  Some of that boldness comes from my side of the family.  But I think a major component of his willingness to risk attention, is that he has had attention all of his life.  Our highest goal was never to have him be just like "normal" kids.   Normal is not good enough.