Different Drummer

I am by nature an introvert.  I tend to be an observer and can relate to the feeling of being on the periphery of a group of friends or family.   Before I started school, I was surrounded by loving family and believed that all mommies and daddies were deaf inside the house and hearing outside.  The reason for that is sign language was still stigmatized when I was a child in the ‘50s-60s-70s.  My parents didn’t sign in public, only using their voices with my brother, family members and me.

When I was in first grade, we moved to a neighborhood about 10 miles from most other family members.  Our neighbors on either side had children and I wanted to be friends with them.  One morning, I woke to chanting out my bedroom window.  I went outside to see what was going on and found these “friends” dancing atop a mound of peat moss my parents had delivered to our back yard.  They were chanting, “Cassie’s mother is deaf and dumb.”  I wasn’t sure why they were calling my mom dumb because she wasn’t.  I was hurt and angry, charging up the mound to push them all off.

I ran inside and found Mom in the kitchen.  I mouthed and acted out what happened, and her eyes began flashing with anger.  I wanted to know what “deaf and dumb” was.  Mom said it was an insult because she couldn’t hear.  That was news to me.  For the first time, it crossed my mind that she couldn’t hear me speak.

“Can you hear me?” I asked, loudly, and she shook her head no.  Now I was really upset.  I shouted, “Can’t you hear me NOW?” She shook her head no over and over.  I was thunderstruck.  My parents weren’t like the neighbor kids’ parents at all.  Just as suddenly, I realized we were different.

I did eventually make friends with other kids in the neighborhood but I was more reserved than I ever had been.  I’d been burned and never played with those first friends again.  Sometimes the newer friends would invite me to their houses to play; I was reluctant to ask them to come to mine.  I didn’t want a repeat of those first new “friends”.

At 10, we moved to Baltimore.  People thought I was shy because I was very quiet.  My brother and I did play with kids in the neighborhood but we were always on tenterhooks because we were different.  Sometimes those kids would taunt us and say our parents were foreign spies because they “talked funny.”  It was a lonely feeling, not being a part of the group.

It wasn’t just my parents’ deafness that made me feel different.  It was as if being far from family removed my parents’ inhibitions.  They discovered a social club for the Deaf and that became their center.  The drinking and domestic violence began.  My brother and I didn’t want to have friends over.  I didn’t want anyone to learn the truth about what was happening in my family.  I already had co-dependent characteristics and they were aggravated and increased by the drinking and fighting.

As I maneuvered my way through school, I had a handful of friends.  We socialized by phone only after school.  I never fit in with a clique.  Fortunately, after a disastrous year in junior high, I managed to move up from the bullied loser caste level to a level where the mean kids just tolerated and left me alone.  I was just so relieved to be away from the cliques. 

I preferred to hang out in my bedroom with the door closed, reading or writing, and listening to Neil Diamond.  I enjoyed my privacy and definitely enjoyed being away from my battling parents.

As I got older, I learned about transcendentalism and was introduced, by a favorite English teacher, to writers like Emerson and Thoreau.  I found a quote that hit me where I lived and it became “mine”:

If a man does not
keep pace with
his companions,
perhaps it is
because he hears a
different drummer.
Let him step to
the music which
he hears, however
measured or
far away.  –Henry David Thoreau

This is me, I thought.  It was an early act of self-care that I took this quote and decided to wear it proudly as a shield against hurtful words and being left out. 

It wasn’t always easy to wear that shield, especially when it came to dealing with my parents and their issues.  All of my own were triggered often as I tried to be a “good girl” to control their drinking and stop them hitting each other.  Stress brought on panic attacks/depression and I would lose that shield I was wearing.  Sometimes I couldn’t find it again for long periods of time.  I told my parents I needed to see a psychiatrist, and they were horrified.  How embarrassing.

I got help once I got a full-time job with benefits.  Therapy was a little helpful in that I got medication to reduced my panic attacks and depression. It was 1974 and there wasn’t a lot of information about children growing up in dysfunctional homes.   It was in the early 1990s before I learned about 12 step meetings specifically about my experiences.  Later on, in the ‘90s, I found a therapist who had alcoholic parents.  I learned so much about why and how I felt such intense anger and anxiety.  Understanding why I felt as I did help me learn how to reshape my own responses to difficult situations.  It’s taken years but now I’m in a very comfortable place.

I know how to act like an extrovert and I can take that role if it’s necessary.  Most of the time, though, I am who I am and don’t feel a need to explain myself or feel left out of things or hurt.  I have a few good friends, my books, my music, my writing.  Most of all, I have a supportive and loving husband, and an awesome blended family, 3 of my own adult children, 2 of his, 8 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren.  Life is good.  I am grateful.

I still march to that different beat.  I always will.

 

Michigan Parents Want ASL in Schools

I was grabbed by a headline I saw the other day and only just got a chance to read it.  It’s called “Parents of deaf kids push for more American Sign Language education” and this is the url: https://www.wxyz.com/news/national/two-americas/parents-of-deaf-kids-push-for-more-american-sign-language-education.  It grabbed me, of course, because these were *hearing* parents of deaf kids requesting ASL education. 

I wrote before about the times in which my parents grew up and hearing parents were mostly very much against deaf children learning sign language.  I also wrote about my experiences as an interpreter for Deaf students in the school system.  There, there were 3 different methods of communication and 3 different kinds of interpreters: sign language, cued speech and lipreading (oral method).  We were beginning to see the spread of cochlear implants, the newest thing in “fixing” a Deaf kid.

 When Deaf parents have a Deaf baby, that child learns sign language right from the beginning.  When they begin school, they have a language in place: American Sign Language.  They have an easier time with English and don’t lag behind as much as the deaf kids with hearing parents. 

Why?  Those kids don’t have language from the get go.  It takes a while for the parent to realize there’s a problem.  The first thing they do is take their kids to doctors and audiologists who still view deafness as something pathological that needs to be “fixed”.  They recommend testing to see if the kids qualify for cochlear implants.  Meanwhile, other hearing kids are in preschool learning and signing deaf kids are in the process of acquiring more language too.

By the time deaf kids of hearing parents enter kindergarten, they’re lagging behind their hearing and signing deaf peers.  They may or may not have been implanted.  The white coated specialists have advised hearing parents NOT to use sign language because it might “impede” language acquisition.  This is the same bullshit reasoning used when my mother attended an oral-only school for the deaf.  Everyone told my grandparents that learning sign language would prevent my mother from speaking proper English.

Hearing educators think they know what’s best for Deaf children.  They don’t.  They know little to nothing about sign language and how much it benefits and enriches the lives of Deaf people.  I’m very happy that, in this article, mothers in Michigan with deaf kids are united in trying to get a bill passed in their state legislature that would allow for ASL in schools.  “These women are now behind the fight for Lead-K, a legislative campaign calling for the state to put ASL learning on equal footing with English, and ensure deaf kids are at age-expected levels by kindergarten.”  I hope it passes but don’t hold out with too much hope for it because of the mindset of the GQP: they are determined to set the clocks back any way they can.

Even after the Deaf President Now and Deaf Pride movement, there is still so much ignorance about deafness.  I think many people think ASL is just uneducated English.  It’s not.  It’s a beautiful expressive language with its own grammatical rules, syntax, and idioms.  Here’s a better source explaining what ASL is from the National Association of the Deaf’s website: https://www.nad.org/resources/american-sign-language/what-is-american-sign-language/

 

Gen Z Rocks!

There’s a lot to admire about Gen Z.  They are the generation coming up the ranks now and are between 10 and 25 years old.  Most of our grandchildren are “zoomers” and I’m glad that’s another name for them because they remind me of us Baby Boomers when we were young.  We were the generation that brought down a President (Lyndon B. Johnson) because of the unpopular Viet Nam War.  I don’t remember seeing such a movement with Gen X or Millennials as I’m seeing now with young people.

Gen Z kids are a lot more tech savvy than us old fogey Boomers.  They’re as passionate, if not more, than we ever were about wars, the environment, racial injustice and other social issues.  Three examples right off the bat:

Greta Thunberg who, at 15, staged a one student protest about climate change that inspired many more young people to speak up and DO something.  She has an abrasive quality to her manner but that’s perfectly understandable: she’s tired of the bullshit denials and platitudes of those who won’t legislate and change how we use our resources.  She will be a formidable young woman.  She is 19 now and will go far.

Then there’s David Hogg, survivor of the Margery Stoneman Douglas school massacre in 2018.  After that, in spite of being stalked by the lunatic Congressfool Marjorie Taylor Greene, has organized protests against gun violence and has become a gun control advocate.  Right now, he’s involved in organizing marches in several large cities this June 11 to protest gun violence.  He’s 22 years old now and a student at Harvard.  I would like to see him run for public office.

I don’t want to leave out Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, the girl who would be educated and was shot in the head for it.  She’s a human rights activist now for women’s rights and is 24.

Other Zoomers:

Amanda Gorman, the youngest US poet laureate, who recently wrote another moving poem in the aftermath of the Uvalde massacre

Athletes Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, Chloe Kim, and Lydia Ko

More actors/actresses and singers/musicians than I can name

Zoomers have protested injustice against people of color and LGBTQ.  Kids walked out of their classes this week to protest the lack of response from our do-nothing Congress about yet another massacre of children so close on the mass murder of elderly black people.

I am thrilled to see so many Gen Z entering into politics.  I will vote for them and I look forward to positive changes they will make.

Confused by all the generations?  Check out this link:

https://www.kasasa.com/exchange/articles/generations/gen-x-gen-y-gen-z