I had no regrets, but it was tough. Half of it was that I thought I would miss my friends and that I was disappointing them, which was devastating. But the other half, which I was finally acknowledging, was that I felt like they had disappointed me by telling me I was someone I wasn’t, by saying that I could function as a hearing person, and by making me feel that I wasn’t meeting their standards. I was very hard on myself, striving to stand tall, and yet I felt as if I had failed in their eyes.
I prayed to find peace with my decision, find acceptance and peace with myself. I needed peace with my life, my family, my neighborhood friends, and the world. Although I didn’t agree with everyone’s claim that I was normal like them, I wasn’t savvy enough to explain to them how I felt or what I needed. I wasn’t able to say that even though I walked down the hallways in school with a big smile on my face, a deep-down part of me wanted to curl up in the corner and have everybody leave me alone. I remember walking over to the cornfields about a block from my house one day and just sitting there, in the middle of the stalks, trying to come to terms with it all. I was longing to hear some wisdom that would help me see the light. I didn’t want to feel like the lone soldier out there.
I arrived at Hinsdale South and loved it. The school had 2,000 hearing students and 150 deaf students—so many more than in elementary school and junior high, as the deaf kids from each district came to Hinsdale. They all took classes in the deaf wing—except me. Even after making the huge decision to switch schools, I still avoided the deaf program and took all my core classes with the hearing kids, with the use of a sign language interpreter. Part of me still believed that I was smarter than the other deaf students, and I still needed to cling to what was familiar and to what I thought people expected of me. I was still entrenched in the hearing world and was not ready to loosen the ties.
Even so, I took a few classes with the deaf kids, like Health and Consumer Education, and these classes ended up being my favorites. I just loved the direct communication and soaked it in; it was so much more fulfilling than finding out what was going on through an interpreter. I socialized with the deaf kids at lunch, in gym class, and after school, as well, becoming part of a group and the culture I craved.
The summer between my sophomore and junior years, twenty of us went to a deaf camp in the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York; we all took the bus there together. This Catholic camp, called Camp Mark Seven, was run by a deaf priest named Father Tom. I had no expectations—my friends were going, so I went along. We arrived right before dinnertime and checked into our dorms.
Whoa. I had walked into a different world, into Deaf Culture, and into the Deaf community.
Everyone there was either deaf or they signed—the counselors, cooks, maintenance people, lifeguards—right down to the nurse. It wasn’t participating in the camp activities with my deaf friends that made the difference—I’d done lots of activities with them at school—the difference was that the entire staff was also deaf. Until that time, I had never really interacted with a single deaf adult. These days, it’s different; but back in the 1980s, most teachers for the deaf, like those at South, were hearing. My parents and relatives were all hearing. In the Deaf Culture, we talk about the 90 percent rule: 90 percent of deaf parents have hearing children, and 90 percent of deaf children have hearing parents. Over the years, I’ve met deaf children who thought they were going to die by the time they reached eighteen because they had never met a deaf adult. Many certainly don’t believe they can make it in the general culture.
It was as if I could finally believe in my future.
For the first time since I was six years old, I was signing with deaf adults in an environment where communication was 100 percent accessible to me. I had full communication. No more missing out on parts of conversations; no more feeling like I wasn’t being understood. For two whole weeks, I was smack in the middle of everything and soaked it up like nothing before—helping out in the mess hall and making meals with George the cook, and helping the lifeguard put away the pool chairs. When I rode home on the bus two weeks later, I immediately felt like my communication was gone—like the air was just being sucked out of me.
My camp counselor, Carla, was a psychology major at Gallaudet College (later called Gallaudet University). She had an air of confidence about her—she was independent and had dreams of her own; having that camper-counselor relationship with her allowed me to see beyond Naperville and Hinsdale South and realize that there was a life out there waiting for me. Even though we rarely talked specifically about being deaf, I never forgot the time we did because her words have become my mantra for raising Zoe. We were sitting by the archery court one afternoon.
“You think much about being deaf?” I asked.
“You mean how it impacts your life and stuff?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Not really,” Carla said. “I learned long ago that you need to make it your friend—you won’t get through life if you don’t.”
“Hmm . . . never thought about it that way.”
“Yeah, Brandi,” she said. “Whatever you do, you have to embrace that you are deaf, but don’t ever let it define you.”
The camp was called Mark Seven because in the Bible, Mark 7 references Jesus healing a deaf person. I remember Father Tom telling us those particular verses—verses 7:31, 34, and 35. All of the campers were sitting down by the lake with the tall trees surrounding its circumference and providing shade, where every morning he gave his daily sermons and workshops; the outdoors was our chapel.
“Jesus heals a deaf man,” he signed, his round-rimmed glasses reflecting the sunlight. “Looking up to heaven, he sighed and said, Ephphatha, which means, ‘Be opened.’ Instantly the man could hear perfectly, and his tongue was freed so he could speak plainly.” He continued, “Ephphatha means empathy—be thou open. When Jesus said it to the deaf man, it meant, ‘open your ears and you become hearing.’”
A chill went up my spine. Immediately, I understood, “Be thou open,” to mean: be open to life, to people, to ideas; be accepting. Don’t judge. Already I knew that I was more open and accepting of others than most—like a mother figure—although I was too young then to realize that it was because of having experienced my own loss, of having become deaf. By fifth grade, I was able to discern what people were really thinking, yet not judge them. Even though I hadn’t walked in their shoes, I could understand them and what they were about. I’d made fun of the kids who were riding the “baby” bus one year, and the next, I was riding it myself. Although I couldn’t articulate these thoughts back then, on some level, I grasped that people’s differences added richness and soul to life and to being human. Hearing Father Tom’s words that day helped me to understand that a little bit better.
Late one afternoon, Father Tom was talking to us down by the water, his straight, dark brown hair looking jet black, with the sun hiding behind the trees. He had a medium build and was wearing black pants and a paisley green shirt.
“How many of you are proud to be deaf?” he asked, in his kind and unassuming manner.
No one raised their hand. I remember thinking, This man is crazy.
He continued on, “It was a difficult job for God to make people because he had to give each person a completely different personality and appearance.” He thought for a second and then continued signing. “So, to make it easier for himself, he made one recipe for the human body.”
I sat there, listening intently.
“Yet, he made a different body recipe, a special one, for deaf people. God put more effort into making this unique group of people,” he said. “Being deaf is a gift from God.”
Wham. Bam. I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.
It wasn’t that I