If I had to choose just one issue I’ve struggled with almost my entire life, it is that I have no control over anything … except for my own behavior, maybe. It’s a struggle because what I need to have most is control over everything – the health and safety and well being of my loved ones and me. I think I’m getting it. It’s taken a long time.
All during my growing up years, I heard from family and friends:
You’re such a good girl. You’ll take care of your parents.
You’re lucky. You have such a nice family!
Your parents will always need you. You have a big responsibility.
My parents were deaf. They also drank to excess. Just having deaf parents can make a coda (child of deaf adults) codependent. There’s a whole slew of issues discussed in a book called Mother Father Deaf (by Paul Preston). There’s another whole slew of issues discussed in It Will Never Happen to Me (by Claudia Black). The issues are just about the same on both lists.
I interpreted for my parents from a young age. I didn’t always understand what people were telling me. I couldn’t admit that! My parents need me to tell them what was going on! Sometimes I could guess the concepts I didn’t understand pretty accurately. The easiest things to understand were movie and TV storylines. The doctor was pretty clear too, most of the time. I did parent-teacher conferences too. Well, I didn’t interpret everything, but definitely all the good stuff. The bad stuff could always be “dressed up” a bit so that it didn’t upset or confuse my parents.
Other times it was a disaster. When I was 10, we moved from New York to Maryland. My parents rented our house to people who didn’t pay their rent. Before we could get them evicted, we fell far behind in mortgage payments and the bank foreclosed on the house. I know all this now; then, I had no idea what was happening. My uncle, in New York, who was acting on behalf of my parents explained to me that the house was “in escrow”. Escrow? What was that? I tried to ask my uncle and he gave me a lot of gobble-de-gook. My father began to get upset because of the look on my face. So I quickly got rid of the puzzled expression, took control, and calmly explained that our house was being put into a cage – which was where crows in captivity lived. Well … we never got our house out of the cage anyway.
It was really important for me to stay on top of things so everything would operate smoothly. Who had time for kid stuff like jump rope? I was negotiating on my parents’ behalf when my brother got into trouble at school. He forged absence notes. The principal called me down to Pete’s classroom at the end of the school day. The teacher had already confronted my brother. She wanted to call our parents and he told her no, we don’t have a phone and they’re deaf and it’s better to talk to my sister. I gave my brother the proper parental glares as the teacher and principal explained the gravity of Pete’s transgressions. I promised to tell my parents and promised it would never happen again. I yelled at my brother all the way home. I told my mother what happened, said it was taken care of, and went outside to play. Well … I did like hopscotch. I was still only 10.
I learned a lot of stuff about everything when I was a kid. There’s a lot that goes on in the world that kids are usually protected from. When you have deaf parents, though, you have to set squeamish or uncomfortable feelings aside. How else are the deaf parents going to know what to do? How else are they going to know what is going on? Looking back, the hardest things I had to set my feelings aside for was deaths in the family. It’s hard to tell your parents someone has died when you’re crying hysterically. It’s also hard to stay calm when you’re hearing that people you’ve loved all your life are gone.
Pete’s appendix ruptured not too long after we moved to Maryland. He was doubled over with pain, and my parents brought him to one emergency room. A lady asked me about insurance, I asked my dad, and he answered honestly that he’d just started working as a printer for the paper and he wouldn’t have insurance for another month. Next thing I knew, we were leaving and going to another hospital. When the lady asked about insurance, I knew the answer. Normally in a situation like that, I’d answer for my dad but … there was something about what had happened that made me not do it. I asked him the question and he lied, straight faced. A few days later, Pete was recovering nicely and someone came to the room to talk to us about the bill. He was really angry that my father said we had insurance and we didn’t. “Oh,” I spoke up. “I thought she said ‘so you DON’T have insurance’.” Somehow I knew that man would not be as angry with a little kid and I was right.
I developed some very strange beliefs when my parents started drinking. Usually they’d start fighting with each other. I thought that I could change that if I could keep them happy enough. I could clean the house, make the dinner, wash and dry the dishes and keep the “chat” happy and light. It seemed to work most of the time but not always. When it didn’t, I believed it was because I’d screwed it up somehow. I had some other magical thinking too. They bowled on a league every week and after the games, they’d go to the bar. My father almost always drove under the influence. I was way too scared to get in the car with them but I believed that as long as I stayed up and didn’t sleep, they’d be fine. I’d get tired around midnight and I’d keep looking out the window to see if their car was coming. Once it pulled into the drive, I could go to bed and go to sleep.
I think the struggle to control everything started back then, even before my parents began drinking. If I could manipulate people and events in a certain way, there was less upset to our family. Being a kid, I didn’t see how complicated and impossible it is to try and control everything. I was trying to be a puppet master but not only did I not know how to work the strings correctly, not all of my puppets had strings to begin with! Kids don’t see all that. They just see something that works – no matter how screwed up or tenuous it is! If it works, it’s worth doing again … until you don’t know any other way of getting by. That’s the part that is the most frustrating … what I learned worked as a kid stopped working when I became an adult.
Now what was I supposed to do? Unlearn everything I’d mastered in 18 years?
This is the frustrating part: you never totally unlearn it. It takes a lot of work to even move in a different direction, a different way of responding. I had to WANT to make a change.
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