Learning to Hear and Accept Herself

In first grade, I needed speech lessons to help me pronounce my “Rs” and “Ss” more clearly. By the time I was in fourth grade, I was sent to a special school for the hearing-impaired because I have a birth defect. My left ear was deformed at birth. There was no opening to the ear canal and there was no eardrum causing deafness in that ear. As a result, my right ear suffered a significant loss due to the strain of having to hear for both ears, so it sort of just pooped out. At that time, the special school was technically called a school for the “deaf and dumb” or the “hard of hearing.” I guess it was a blessing, because at the regular school, I remember being called stupid all the time, but at the new school I was accepted for who I was. The school was mainly trying to teach me to lip read. I never really got any good at it. I was at the hearing-impaired school for one school year and then I went back to regular school. I don’t think the school really worked out very well for me. Next, when I was about eleven years old, Mom and Dad took me to Dr. Williamson. He reconstructed my deformed ear. Taking skin from both legs, the doctor created an opening in my ear with one piece of skin and put the other piece of skin around the top of my ear to make it look more like an ear. Next Dr. Williamson implanted an eardrum. The surgery was somewhat successful in restoring my capacity to hear out of that ear. As a result of all this, however, I missed a lot of school and was held back a year. Guess I should know the fifth grade pretty well, huh? The first time I was caught passing a note in school, I was in the fifth grade. I wanted to ask my friend if she wanted to play jacks at recess. We were studying the judicial system in class at the time. The teacher had the class debate and then take a vote on my punishment. The class agreed I should write, “I will not pass notes” five thousand times. When I told my Mom about this, she was getting ready to go to card club. But before she went, she was going straight up to the school and have a talk with my teacher, Mrs. Plumly. I have no idea what she said to her, but she got my sentence reduced to only five hundred sentences. I never passed another note again. I was twelve when I was fitted with my first hearing aid. When I got home, I sat on the couch in the living room. It was overwhelming what I could hear. I didn’t realize what I was missing. I could hear the family talking in the kitchen, I could hear the birds singing outside, and that evening I was surprised to hear the crickets and the locust. I was so overwhelmed I began to cry. My hearing aid was the very latest in technology, because I was able to conceal it. Daddy nicknamed me “Sputnik,” after the first satellite, the most modern of space technology. I realize that I have tried very hard to cover up my impairment. Someone forgot to tell me it was “okay” to be handicapped. With Diana’s help, I have come a long way. I have learned that my impairment does not mean I am stupid or dumb. Diana has taught me how to caress my inner child and to take myself by the hand when I am feeling low or out of sorts because of my hearing problem. If I had known it was all right to be hearing impaired, I might have just told everyone to slow down so I could catch everything that was going on.