I hear with my eyes - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Donna McDonald
AS A CHILD, I WAS LIKE A MIRROR. Unaware of my difference, I reflected back to my family an image capable of being shaped by their love and attention. I was a child without knowledge, without speech. I was immersed in my world of noiseless senses: my life's task was simply to "be". During those early years, I was variously coaxed, dragooned and persuaded into the world of hearing. I was introduced to a world of bubbles, balloons and fingers placed on lips to learn the shape and feel of sounds, their push and pull of air through tongue and lips. The words came later, much later.
You might imagine that this was a lot of hard work, but I only recall it as play. The hard work was done by others: by my mother, my teachers.
It was only when I went to All Hallows, an inner-city girls' college that had agreed to take me despite their reservations that I began to experience the concept of hard work. On the first day of my new life, one in which I would effectively be divorced from the deaf world, I stared at myself in my bedroom mirror. My sister, Cecily, stood beside me, sharing the appraisal.
My new conformity required a martial brown uniform with box pleats and more buttons than anyone could possibly need. My eyes, though, were drawn to my hair. My mother had pulled it tightly back off my face into a ponytail, revealing my hearing aid with its pink cord looping its way from my left ear to inside the collar of my uniform down to the bulge near my waist. The box of sound pressed warmly against my flesh, the up-down volume button rustling against the cloth of my uniform. I leant forward and tried to loosen my hair so that it covered my ears; no, the band was fastened too securely. Cecily chewed her bottom lip in sympathy.
My mother came back into the room. "Mum, it's too tight, my ears stick out." I pulled again at the ribbons, mussing up my hair. But my mother bent down and imprisoned my hands in her grasp. "Leave it. Let everyone see your beautiful ears." She wanted to send me off to my new school with the rhythm of bravado in my footsteps: I was deaf; I wore a hearing aid; that was that. I felt doubtful. I wasn't sure that I liked this approach. I wanted my hair falling loose, the way it had been before.
Still, I took on the job of interpreting the whirl of sounds around me in the classroom and playground, my teachers and classmates swinging from face-contorting exaggerated clarity of speech to forgetting to face me so that I could "see" what was being said. I worked hard at being "normal", to be invisible inside the wider group around me. I tried to blend into the landscape of the school playground. After a while, I began to collect new names to remember: Susan, Deborah, Maria. These girls enjoyed my quietness and the intensity of my gaze on their faces. They mistook this for a fascination with their conversation, not knowing my fatigue from the effort of comprehending quick words, of catching sentences slipped through murmuring lips, of watching for nuances of impatience when I missed their meaning. My smiles disguised my lapses of concentration.
"Why can't you speak properly? Why can't you say "ess"? Why can't you sit with me at the back of the class? Why can't, why not, why...?" I grew used to the rhythms of my new classmates' questions. I cried at first, my voice breaking: "They ask me all the time!" My mother was brisk. She adopted a no-nonsense approach: "Just answer them, just tell them. They aren't being unkind, they just want to know, that's all." She taught me to answer questions about my deafness as directly as possible. In any case, I discovered the more fully I answered the questions, the more quickly the questions died away. I came to accept my classmates' ignorance, I understood that they couldn't help not knowing about being deaf. It wasn't their fault.
Once though, I was thrown: "Tell me, why can't you hear? Did you do something wrong?" The words seemed to echo: "Something wrong." I felt clammy and breathless. I looked back at the girl, searching her face for cruelty, for torment, but saw only a freckled face knotted with puzzlement. I coughed, trying to catch my breath. "I was just born that way. I was born deaf. You know, I was just born," stumbling now, "not to hear." The last words felt clumsy in my mouth, taking up too much room, stretching my lips unnaturally. I backed away from the freckled face, willing it to dissolve. "I didn't do anything wrong," I said, my voice faltering. "There's nothing wrong." Even as I repeated the words, I felt queasy. I wasn't sure.
I longed for the carefully spaced words of my old teachers; I missed the theatre of my conversations with my old friends, their faces lively with meaning and their hands gesturing the story when their words could not. I was school-sick: I didn't want to learn any more new names; I liked the old ones: Sharon, Matthew, Kay. I wondered when I would be able to go back to my old school. I wasn't sure how long I was going to be at this new school. I did not want to ask my mother. Such a simple direct question seemed beyond my grasp.
Even a year after I started at my new school, when I was nine years old and in Grade 4, I sometimes stood at the chain wire fence bordering the playgrounds, imagining that I could see across the muddy river to the deaf school. It wasn't that I was terribly unhappy; well, maybe just a little. It was more that while I was conscious of everyone's kindness and efforts to reach out to me, I also felt I was in the wrong place. I didn't belong at the new school; I belonged at the deaf school.
On the first day of each new school year for a few years, I would wait, looking out with hope for Sharon, anyone from the deaf school, to turn up. I never expressed my hope aloud to anyone. I held it to myself. I knew the voicing of this hope out loud would clang. It would jar in a way that I didn't understand. And so, instead of killing the hope swiftly by exposing it, I secured it to myself for too many years, allowing the hope to wilt a little more each year, and me along with it. I lost a little bit of heart.
It took me the rest of my primary-school years before I accepted wholeheartedly that I was at All Hallows and began to make real efforts to belong. Over time, I gradually learnt through closer observation that the art of friendship lay in the ebb and flow of exchanges between people, and involved a lot of apparently aimless hanging around. And so, I hung around and grew more involved in school life, more confident in my place in the world. However, ever mindful that I didn't really belong, I made a point of always being pleasant, of smiling a lot, of looking cheerful.
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, I RECEIVED AN INVITATION TO ATTEND the "class of '62" reunion of my friends from the deaf school. When I realised that I would be overseas on that date, I arranged to have lunch with the reunion organiser, Jennifer Holdsworth. We had not seen each other or even been in contact with each other since 1962, but when we saw each other again, uncomprehending of our private histories that had aged us both, we embraced with all the warmth and affection of unbroken friendship.
Jennifer had brought some photos with her; some of them were already familiar to me, others were new. As we looked through the photos together, exclaiming over this person and that person – Jennifer knew who was doing what; she knew all their careers, marriages, children, divorces and grief; she'd kept up with all their news – I started to cry. I could not explain to Jennifer, or to myself for that matter, the sense that I had lost something by not being a part of my childhood friends' evolving lives. On seeing my tears, Jennifer insisted on arranging for a few of my old deaf-school classmates to meet me for an after-work drink the day before I left for overseas.
And so, just three days later, some of us gathered in an inner-city cafe, smiling at each other, excited and awkward in our efforts to catch up on so many years in such a brief splice of time: Carmel, who still sported the scar on her forehead from when she had fallen off the monkey bars in the playground; Wayne, one of the little boys who had looked so particularly unhappy in his elf outfit in a class photo but who now bore the maturity of the senior Australian Customs officer that he was; Matthew, who was my first boyfriend, carrying my things for me when we were both four years old at the deaf preschool; and Jennifer.
We tried to chat. We wanted to share our news and our clannish excitement, but the differences in our communication styles were too great to be breached easily or quickly. The others were able to sign to each other, but I do not sign: I have never learnt Auslan, the Australian sign language. Our ability to comprehend speech varied markedly, so that we spoke at different speeds and different pitches and even with different grammar to each other, depending on who was holding the floor at any one time. I spent much of the hour smiling; I was happy to be with my deaf companions. I did not feel any need to do or be anything more than that: I just simply liked being with them.
Since that brief reunion I have worked in public policy in England, established myself here as a freelance writer and policy analyst and been invited to work in London again. I enjoy remarkable work opportunities, illustrating the breadth and extent of the world that continues to be open to me because I can listen, speak and communicate ... gifts given to me when I was just a child. ♦