Well let’s see…what to say?

I was born profoundly deaf due to complications from maternal rubella. Since I was my mother’s first child, she didn’t pick up on the fact that I might be deaf until I was about three years old. At that point, a friend of hers with a deaf daughter of her own saw me watching TV and ignoring calls for lunch and said, “That’s not the terrible twos, get her hearing tested.”

So she did and I was duly outfitted with hearing aids, went through a summer session at John Tracey Clinic in Los Angeles. I went to kindergarten and first grade at a private school and I did well enough my mom lobbied to have me mainstreamed into the local neighborhood schools (mainstreaming wasn’t necessarily automatic in the early seventies). For several years, until 6th grade if I remember, I had itinerant tutors come by once or twice a week to give me lessons in speech therapy and to make sure I was doing okay in classes.

This was 100% oral, I never did learn sign language at any point in school. I was always the only deaf kid in school; despite my mom’s getting to know other women with rubella babies, I never socialized with other deaf children. I’ve never asked my mom, but I suspect we were kept somewhat apart to reinforce the oral education.

School was structured enough I did fine as long as there weren’t too many group discussions. It got a little trickier in college, but I found most professors willing to accommodate extra reports or quizzes in lieu of class participation so none of this was a real problem. On through university, jobs, and life in general.

The interesting thing is that when the second Gallaudet protests started up last year, I caught wind of it, and started to monitor the news and blogs coming out of it. That has certainly triggered a lot of reactions, thinking, and re-evaluation. And at the beginning of this year 2007, I started to learn ASL.

If you’d like to email me directly, try browneyedgirl 65 “at” gmail “dot” com. Remove spaces, and replace the “at” and “dot” as usual…