I hear with my eyes
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Donna McDonald
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Donna McDonald's biography and other articles by this writer
I’m deaf. My being deaf seems to be significant to other people. "Why do you speak like that?" This question has recurred throughout my life: usually explosively from the mouths of small children unable to contain the excitement of their curiosity, but sometimes expressed with a flicker of puzzlement across an adult's brow.
"What can you hear?" is usually the companion question. Without my hearing aid, if I am concentrating and if the sounds are made loudly, I am aware of those sounds at the deeper end of the scale. Sometimes, it's not so much that I can actually hear them, it's more that I know that those sounds are happening. My aural memory of the deep-register sounds helps me to "hear" them, much like the recollection of any tune replays itself in your imagination.
With or without my hearing aids, if I am not watching the source of those sounds – for example, if the sounds are taking place in another room or even just behind me – I am not immediately able to distinguish whether the sounds are conversational or musical or happy or angry. I can only discriminate once I've established the rhythm of the sounds; if the rhythm is at a tearing, jagged pace with an exaggerated rise and fall in the volume, I might reasonably assume that angry words are being said.
I cannot hear high-pitched sounds at all, with or without my hearing aid. So I cannot hear sibilants like "c", "s" and "z". I cannot hear those sounds that bounce or puff off from the lips, such as the letters "b" and "p". I cannot hear the sound that trampolines from the press of your tongue against the back of your front teeth, the letter "t". With a hearing aid, I can hear and discriminate among the braying, heehawing, lilting, oohing and twanging sounds of the vowels ... but only if I am concentrating, and only if I am also watching the source of the sounds. Without my hearing aid, I might also hear sharp and sudden sounds like the clap of hands or crash of plates, depending on the volume of the noise. But I can't hear the ring of the telephone or the chime of the doorbell or the urgent siren of an ambulance speeding down the street. My hearing aid helps me to hear some of these sounds.
The cause of my deafness is unknown, although there was a rubella epidemic at the time of my birth. Also, my mother apparently had the flu accompanied by a very high temperature during pregnancy but a causal link has never been confirmed. The mystery remains.
SOME YEARS AGO, IN CONFRONTING THE IMPACT OF WORK on my health, I was pushed into contemplating the impact of being deaf on my life. I was struggling with my work and I wanted advice about how to manage my stress, so I went to see a psychologist. He was a softly spoken man, too softly spoken for my liking. I strained to hear him. Lip-reading – my fall-back position – was out of the question because he had an untidy beard fluffing up around his mouth and blurring the outlines of his words. It was like reading fading print: I could just make out the occasional vowel, but was that a "p" or a "b"? I couldn't quite see. Anyway, this psychologist took my history. He wrote a lot, looking up at me regularly from his concentration on the spiral notebook on his lap. I told him stories of long hours, of impossible deadlines, of coming out in strange red-striped welts all over my body. I told him stories of lying in bed at two o'clock in the morning, wondering whether the intense shooting pain down my left arm presaged a heart attack or whether I'd just slept on it crookedly.
I told my stories quickly, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, because I didn't want to appear as though I was feeling sorry for myself, and I looked across the room at him, waiting for him to respond to my anxiety, to take the heaviness and fatigue out of my body. I watched his reactions carefully. I regarded him as an oracle.
But I was not rewarded with the relief of revelation. Instead, I was mystified by his response. I thought perhaps I hadn't heard him properly. Which was ironic as it turned out, because his response was a question, a statement offered in the tone of a rising inflection: "Your hearing loss must have had a big impact on you?" I looked at my hands resting on my lap. They were tightly clasped together; I stretched and flexed my fingers to release some of the tension. I looked down at the carpet. I could see dust motes hanging in the air. An arrow of sunshine lit a pathway between me and the psychologist. I looked back at him. I didn't want to offend him. "Hmm, not really ... perhaps?" Short silence; clearing of my throat. "Hmm, what was the question again?"
"Your deafness. It must surely have had a profound impact on you as you were growing up." No rising inflection this time. A declamatory statement, the force of it mercifully muffled by that fluffy beard. I thought a bit. I wanted to deflect his attention away from this line of inquiry. I didn't get it: why was he asking about my deafness? After all, I thought, being deaf was just part of who I was.
Certainly, I've had a different life from others in some ways, but the differences arising from my deafness do not seem to be particularly great or exceptional. I could whittle them down to a few things: I wear a hearing aid (sometimes I wear two when I really want to hear – for example, at meetings); I went to a school for the deaf from when I was about three years old until I was eight years old; I've had to make adjustments from time to time, for example, when I transferred from the deaf school to a "normal hearing" school; I sit towards the front of cinemas and conferences to make sure I can see to hear; I dislike dim lighting – whether it's in a restaurant or on a friend's back deck – because I can't see what my companions are saying. And that's about it really. That's what I thought.
But I decided to agree with him. "Oh yes, a big impact. Hmmph ..." I ran out of puff after this gesture of agreement because I couldn't think of anything else to say that the psychologist might like to hear, but it was the right tack to take because he dropped the subject then. We spent the remaining ten minutes tossing around ideas for managing my stress. He told me that it would be good if I could go for a walk each morning to "clear my head". I smiled at him. He looked more cheerful and hopeful when I smiled. He looked like a man who had the satisfaction of knowing he'd done a good job.
STILL, I WONDERED WHY I HAD FELT SO JARRED by the psychologist's certainty. My reflections on my deafness were rekindled later on when I needed a suitcase suitable to take on a holiday to Ireland and England. I went to my mum's home to see what she had. I was full of anticipation, looking forward to my brief adventure. My head was full of possibilities. I felt myself filling up with new and as yet unlived stories.
I was in this mood when my mother called out to me: "Look at this!" She sounded excited. She'd stumbled across an old Globite school case. It was dark brown, cardboardy in texture, with faded green and orange stripes down one side. Just looking at its surface, I could sense mysteries hidden within its archival mustiness. She said: "I'd forgotten all about this. I've kept your old things in here." She opened the school case and the air swirled with the clamour of noise and the smells of my girlhood years. Or so it seemed.
I looked down at my childhood paintings forming the top layer of this archaeological site. My mother started rummaging, pushing things aside and holding up other things for me to see. Here was my Grade 2 catechism project book. And there was an exercise book – with the legend inscribed on the front: "The Department of Public Instruction" – from my days at the deaf school.
I riffled through the pages and could remember, could smell, my school days. I could smell the Clag glue, the purple dye of the roneo stencilling machine, the plastic bowls with apples diced up in small, discoloured pieces swimming in orange juice and the dust of the white chalk. And I could see Mr Pritchard standing tall at the blackboard in front of his class of twelve children, teaching the story of Androcles and the lion. I remembered how my very best friend, Sharon, and I felt sad for the lion. We had to write out his story. And there it was in my exercise pad. I wanted to dive into that Globite school case and sink into its bed of memories.
When I was a little girl with wispy hair tied in two bunches, I wanted to write books. One afternoon, I gathered together some sheets of paper, packed them into a neat block on the top of my chenille-covered bed, knelt by the edge of the bed and started to write. I gripped my HB pencil in my right hand and gouged out a title: My Stories. But I could go no further. Despite the urge to transpose into writing those sounds that I was learning to read, I felt a silence well up within me. I was unable to translate the pictures I saw on my mind's screen into word images on the page before me.
Sometimes, I wonder if my love of words – the need to taste them on my tongue and to see them rounded out on paper – has its origins in the chamber of silence that I must have lived in during the first three years of my life, before my deafness was diagnosed. I was born deaf in the mid-1950s, an era when such things mattered, when parents were still being advised either to place a child with a disability in an institution or to accept a future of limited possibilities for that child.
A short woman with a broad smile and green eyes that hint at secrets she would be willing to share in exchange for a laugh and a cigarette, my mother has never volunteered much to me about what it was like to be the mother of a deaf child at that time, to be part of a pioneering group of mothers who placed their children in an oral-education program intended to teach deaf children to speak their words out aloud rather than to sign them silently – but so expressively – with their hands. She doesn't give herself the luxury of reflection: she simply saw she had a job to do and, like the country-born woman that she is, she just got on with it.
My mother thinks it is a miracle that I can speak, that I can take my place in the hearing world. She concedes that this miracle lacks the lightness of grace because it was wrought from effort and courage – hers in setting the pace, mine in staying the course.
When I was just an infant, she traipsed around town from specialist to specialist seeking out an explanation for my lack of speech. Once or twice, she was told that I was "mentally handicapped" or "just slow". She knew with all the sureness of a mother's heart that this was simply wrong. She could not reconcile this verdict with what she saw in me each day: my alertness, my evident ability to read her moods and my world from even the most subtle visual cues. My mother was defiant about this. Once, a woman on a tram recoiled from my grunting, mewling antics and asked: "Is she retarded?" Holding me close to her, Mum replied: "No. Are you?" I can imagine her taut face, her eyes daring the woman, a stranger to her, to speak again.
She watched me more closely, and saw my own watchfulness was focused on the movements of her body. She did little tests. One day, as she was hanging out the washing and I was playing around her feet, she dropped a peg from the laundry basket onto the lawn, stood still and said: "Donna, pick up the peg." I didn't react. She pointed then to the peg, repeating her words, and I hurried over to pick it up for her, putting it in her outstretched hand. Another time, standing still at the kitchen doorway, she called out to me: "We're going to the shops now, Donna." Again, I was unmoved. But as she approached me with her handbag, I stirred with the excitement of knowledge: an excursion to the shops was clearly about to take place. And so evidence of a sort mounted up: I knew how to comprehend my world but I couldn't hear and I couldn't speak.
She found out about the Commonwealth Acoustics Laboratory (now Australian Hearing Services) and organised an appointment for me. After I completed a battery of auditory tests, my mum was given a new appointment time to return with me so that I could have a hearing aid fitted. This was a small metal box, to be worn in a harness around my body, with a long looping plastic cord connected to a beige ear mould. An instrument for piercing silence, it absorbed and conveyed sounds, with those sounds eventually separating themselves out into patterns of words and finally into strings of sentences.