When the little red light lit up, they didn’t raise their hand. Instead, my sixteen year old child rested their hands on the edge of the physician’s examining table, as though the hearing test was over. They repeated the test. Again, at 500 Hz, my child did not respond. The other four tones were fine, but I knew from my own two decades of Audiology, that you only have to lose one frequency for your whole world to change. Signs had been showing. There’d been more requests for repetition, more instances where they would slide out of a chair and walk toward me as I was talking. All behaviors I have indulged in order to hear what someone is saying. My child has learned these skills from me, these skills of communication, these skills of concealment and survival. I had hoped it would skip a generation, but here it is. Here we are.
The emotions feel almost impossible. This morning, after taking them to school equipped with Bose Hearphones I purchased yesterday, I curled around the steering wheel of my car in the driveway and wept. The deafness tears. Old Friends - but the kind of old friends you avoid because they carry with them so much knowledge of all you’ve done and gone through - are forgiving in that they don’t bring it up, but you know what they know. You know the truths they carry. That even though you have grown “used” to it, that even though you wear your hearing aids and lateral Bluetooth devices with a sort of ADA-flare because the hearing aid casings are in fact “Merlot” in color, the earmolds zebra-striped, there are Times. You don’t talk about the Times. You don’t let anyone see you during the Times. The Times are the moments when you sit absolutely bare with difference. Usually, something technological brings it on. When I go to the movies, the person managing the closed-captioning device fumbles with it then hands it to me for me to figure out. When I can’t remember where I placed my hearing-aids in their gray, circular case and panic because I have to be at a meeting. When the closed captioning device at the movies begins to hurt my face because there’s too much tech weighing on my nose. When someone says “I’ll call you in two hours,” and I have to charge my Bluetooth interface. When I am face to face with the ways that deafness impacts my life, I feel myself enter the Times. It is a drop in frequency, a full-body form of deafness. I feel my sinking. I am sinking. My soul is sinking, shrinking into the frame of my form, and the form is flawed. There’s no rapid raising of the vibration, of course. There is only the honesty of the descent, the dwelling at the river basin until the water rises and lifts me out. Doing this as the mother of a child is different from doing it just as myself.
My child is gender non-binary. We are accustomed to living between worlds. Between the he and the she of it, between the hearing and the silence of it. My child never had to “come out” to me because while there have been phases of princess dresses and phases of flannel shirts with buttons on a particular side, I have always had enough sense to keep it open. There was a rough phase during which they wondered if they might be trans, and I assured them that gender is fluid and whatever they feel they need I would always listen. My only goal in being a parent has been to be there for them. That was the promise I made the first five seconds I held them in my arms when they were born. With the exception of being very late to pick-up from daycamp when they were seven, I’ve done a good job of it.
Living between worlds has also been part of our shared life because of deafness. I started signing with them immediately, just as I was also getting accustomed to the thought of my own deafness. I had ASL books in every room in the house and would look up signs as I taught the words. They signed their first sentence at nine months as we watched a Baby Einstein video, “The corn is hot like the fire is hot.” I only ever scolded them in sign language because it seemed much more peaceful than raising my voice. We know enough sign to have a conversation, and we often communicate under the radar at public events, but we have always skewed back into the hearing world between us. We have stood on the edge of spoken language together. And it has been like the phenomenal chalk drawings I’ve seen on the internet featuring a chasm in the pavement. We know ASL is literally at our fingers’ tips, but we have clung to speech. Speech is our “known,” even if it has never been wholly comfortable.
I think of Wilderness. I think of the voices that dwell inside the Wilderness. I think of a hike I did once with a young woman named Jane across Cradle Mountain Valley National Park in Tasmania back in 1991 just before Christmas (it was summer, there). Jane and I were both solo travelers hitch-hiking around Tasmania. The problem was that Tasmania is rather small, and given our shared fondness for camping on wineglass bays, we kept meeting. First on Bruny Island, again on Maria Island where we had each hiked an additional 10 miles to get away from the other campsite. So, we decided we would do something together, something bold, something we could not do advisedly as single women. We hiked for eight days, on the last of which the sun finally shone, and we could look back from the peak of basalt cliffs called The Labyrinth and see all the magnificent scenery. Miles replaced meters of what we could see in an instant. All our photos of that hike, though, tell a story not of bad weather but of a heightened state of attention. Lichen and wildflower fill entire frames that, had we better weather, would be filled with vistas. The images remind me how to walk in the wilderness of any unknown. Allow the world to shrink in its scale. Attend to the details. Our eyes adjust.
Learning to lipread, too, was a shift in attention, though an unconscious one at first. So unconscious and powerful was the switch that once I got hearing aids, I didn’t understand spoken speech and actually preferred the made-up language my neuroplasticity had invented. I had to forge through, though. The shift taught me more about the mind than I wanted to know. It doesn’t even tell us when something is wrong and instead adjusts our perceptions so we can pretend nothing is. A little bit here, a little bit there. And soon I was watching people’s faces and mouths for cues without knowing it. Once aware of my deafness, I grew more conscious of lipreading. Almost comically, I focused on lips. Later, I relaxed into speechreading where the whole body and face reveal the cues. Not the specific thoughts or words all the time, but the general wave of meaning washes over me. Hardly a rational science. More ideation and gesture, more aqueous, more, well, fluid.
Yesterday when my child walked toward the car from the school steps, I could see the fatigue that neuroplasticity causes: a whole day of lipreading wears you out. I opened the hearphones I had dug myself a little more into debt to secure, and once the app was downloaded, my child’s eyes opened widely, contently, and then we both pursed our lips as deafness rode between us all the way home like an enormous, loyal but slightly unwieldy dog. That dog’s name is fluidity, I realize. We are in the presence of fluidity once again. Of mist, and fog, of unknowing, of being constantly open to a new shift in decibel’s relationship to frequency. This is something deafness teaches, and something I shift back into when the technology fails or someone wants to phone-talk and I lose the self-assertion to remind them, “I can’t do that.” Deafness is a limitation without being a fixed limit. I can force the boundary. Also, the boundary can force me.
A gift (front row seats at various events) and a curse (you actually need them), my old friend deafness may now be befriending my child, my child who already walks among worlds that others clearly define as being separate. Many would also clearly define “deafness” from “hearing” and “silence” from “sound.” We know better. We both know so much better. Balance is maintained by fluid in the ears that shifts and redistributes its weight without our controlling it. The vast vistas of Tasmania extended forever around us while we could only see the bright lichen on the gray stone in the forest.
***
At the audiology appointment, I accompanied my child into the audiometry booth. They sat and listened to instructions. The audiologist attached the headset and the wires then went to the adjacent booth, visible through the pane of glass. It was all so familiar. What did I feel? Like I was on a rocking boat, like our lives were about to “go about” as they say in sailing. Turn around. I watched and listened. When it was over, the audiologist informed us of the nearly perfect audiogram. My child’s perplexed expression prompted the audiologist to explain there might be an auditory processing issue that the hearphones are addressing.
In the car on the way home, my child wondered if they’d imagined the whole thing, if maybe they wanted to be deaf like I am, if maybe we have become mirrors of one another. They wondered if maybe they were a hypochondriac. I stopped them. What had it been? An auditory hallucination? A prolonged daydream from which it was challenging to surface when spoken to? Was it a journey we simply needed to take together, some deep dive into experience that would bring us closer together but otherwise leave no souvenirs? Were they owning their own deafness, having been made aware of the vicissitudes of hearing by growing up with me? We will never know.
One part of me thinks about the morning I wrote this essay, beginning with tears and moving into acceptance. If all things are fluid, did my writing alter the waves? What waves were they? Sound or reality? In such matters as listening, I’ve learned to drift far beyond what science says. I shall take the same course across the water in this matter. As a parent, it is the only course I know.
Laura Hope-Gill teaches Creative Writing at Lenoir-Rhyne’s Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative in Asheville, where she directs Asheville Wordfest and raises an amazing person. Her poems and stories appear in Parabola, Cairn, Fugue, North Carolina Literary Review, and more.
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