Nobody had ever said that to me before. Oh, I’m sure that my parents, friends, and teachers wanted me to generally feel good about myself. But Father Tom’s words validated my very existence as a deaf person. They were a lifeline connecting me to Me, helping me to see that I wasn’t crazy for feeling different, that I felt different because, good God, I was different, and nothing that anybody could say would ever again make me believe otherwise.
My new awareness was shaky, like a foal first standing on its legs, but that afternoon a window had opened, and I saw that being deaf was the way I was meant to be. At that moment, I knew that going back to Central High for that first year had been a wasted year; I had been trying to prove to everyone that I was hearing, instead of knowing that being deaf was okay.
I realized that I had a choice: I could continue trying to be “hearing” (having hearing friends and taking hearing classes) and fail, or I could be the best deaf person I could be. It was then that I began seeing my being deaf through the eyes of self-acceptance and understanding that it didn’t mean I was failing.
After returning home from camp, I got a job at the Colonial Ice Cream Shop. I worked fountain and just loved eating the ice cream and making all those sundaes. The “Turtle” was made from two pumps of hot fudge, one pump of caramel, and pecans over vanilla ice cream. Another popular sundae, the “E.T.,” named after the movie released that summer, was made from one pump of peanut butter, two pumps of hot fudge, and Reese’s Pieces over vanilla ice cream.
It was at the Colonial that I fell for a hearing guy, and fell hard, beginning a love affair that ultimately led me to discover my deep capacity to give and to receive love. My very first day on the job, Matt came right over to me and said, “Hey gorgeous,” and I thought, Hey gorgeous, yourself.
Matt was seventeen; he was tall with dark brown, curly hair and green eyes and was as kind as he was versatile. He not only worked fountain with me but also did just about every other job in the joint—host, cook, waiter, supervisor. He was different from the crowd: steady, responsible, and loved having a good time. As soon as we began hanging around together, he learned to finger spell (signing words, letter by letter). Then, he bought The Joy of Signing, a popular book back then, and studied signing with a vengeance, picking it up quickly, which I really appreciated.
Occasionally, it was Matt’s job to lock up the shop at night after everyone had gone home. I’d hang around, so it was just the two of us there all alone at midnight. He’d whip up a couple of Monte Cristos or patty melts, and we’d sit at a booth and eat. I brought my great-grandmother’s sterling silver candlesticks from home, which we hid in the ceiling right above the booth and took down whenever we dined.
But Matt’s love notes were what I appreciated most of all; they made me fall in love with him. Every night around midnight, when I wasn’t at the restaurant with him, he’d drive by my house on the way home from work and leave me a letter in my mailbox. Some were strictly love letters; others were his thoughts about his day and other musings; we couldn’t communicate by phone, so letter writing took its place. First thing every morning, I ran to the mailbox to get his note, and then I’d write back, leaving my note in the mailbox in the afternoon for him to pick up that evening. Rather than receiving phone calls from my boyfriend, like hearing girls did, I received his amazing love letters. For once, being deaf had its privileges, and it was my secret—receiving little treasures that the hearing girls would never know . . . a whole box full of them. Matt had a way with words that went straight to the heart.
Summer turned to fall, and once school started, my life was very full. Besides spending time with Matt, my horizons expanded in the deaf circles when I played the role of Lydia in the Chicago stage production of Children of a Lesser God and became Marlee Matlin’s understudy. Lydia wasn’t the lead role; she was one of the students at the school for the deaf. The Immediate Theater Company—an off-Broadway-caliber company—had been looking for someone to play the role and saw me perform it in our high school’s performance of the show, which they came to scout. (Throughout the years, I had participated in “Deaf Drama” as an extracurricular school activity.) The company offered me the role without even auditioning. However, my mother made me turn it down because she thought that it would place too big of a burden on my school schedule. But she agreed to let me be Marlee Matlin’s understudy.
ME AND MATT AT MY SENIOR PROM
When the show ran that summer, Marlee was in the middle of callbacks for the movie for the lead role of Sarah and was gone quite a bit, so I got to perform several times. Back then I did it just for fun. However, I can see now how acting on stage before hundreds of people in the role of a deaf character was a step toward later being on stage before thousands of people representing deafness for real.
From the outside, my life was good; I had a fun job, a great boyfriend, and tons of friends, and I was performing—but on the inside, it was altogether different. Camp had begun my journey toward self-acceptance, but by being with Matt all the time, working at the Colonial, living with my hearing family, and still taking the hearing classes at school, I remained that hearing girl at heart, while my struggles continued to grow.
At Matt’s graduation party at his parents’ home, he was busy entertaining and couldn’t be with me very much, and I felt uncomfortable in the crowd. The same thing occurred at his grandmother’s Thanksgiving dinner: I felt so out of place at that table. Even working at the Colonial—something that I had enjoyed immensely—became more difficult for me to handle. Yes, one-on-one my lipreading was good, but the Colonial was a busy place; usually there were too many conversations happening at once. And just because I could easily talk to a single individual does not mean that people would take the time to talk to me; and when they did, it was usually to give me instructions, not make social talk. That is a big difference. Feeling increasingly left out of the social scene and more and more isolated, having Matt around was my saving grace.
When it came time to choose a college, I went where my deaf friends were going: the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), which is part of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and is located in Upstate New York. NTID attracted deaf students like me who came from hearing families, had been mainstreamed in public school, and were “oral.”
My other option, Gallaudet University, which is located in Washington, DC, had offered me early acceptance beginning January of that year, but I turned it down, wanting to finish high school with my friends and also wanting to have that time with Matt. In addition, because of my limited interactions with deaf people and my misconception that deaf people who don’t speak are not as smart as deaf people who do, I felt that Gallaudet, which tended to attract deaf people who signed and didn’t speak, would not be academically challenging. No one had ever explained to me that the deaf kids who don’t speak, don’t do so because they weren’t exposed to any language whatsoever until they were toddlers—neither sign language nor a spoken language—and that affects their ability to learn. I didn’t know that they were no less smart than the deaf kids who spoke, like me.
This was often the case with deaf children who had hearing parents (which is 90% of all deaf children). Things today are different, but in the past, a child’s deafness often wasn’t discovered until the child was diagnosed with a language delay at two or three years old. By that time, the child has gone years without any language whatsoever, which can be detrimental to the child’s ability to learn.
In contrast, deaf kids born to deaf parents are usually exposed to ASL from birth, just like hearing kids are exposed to a spoken language, and they are academically on par with hearing kids or deaf kids like me who were exposed to language early on.
At the time, I didn’t even realize that Gallaudet was known as the Harvard of deaf universities! At that time, Gallaudet primarily attracted deaf students who had been exposed to sign language from birth, who, unlike me, came from deaf families, and who were part of the Deaf community and Deaf Culture. Instead of going to public school, these students were often sent by their parents to residential schools for