I’m writing this short post to extend my warmest thank you to the people at WordPress who got our pingbacks working again after just twelve short days. In fact, I’d like to thank everyone, from the volunteers, to the Happiness Engineers, and all the way up to the developers! I mean honestly, what can be happier than a Happiness Engineer?
Won’t you join me in thanking them? After all, I’m certain that if all of us express our gratitude they’ll hear our collective voice and not change any more of our controls. Maybe they’ll even give us back some of the features they’ve already taken away to “help make our blogging experience better”!
Here’s to the great people at WordPress!!
P.S. Seriously, thanks for the pingbacks. Blogging prompts without them was annoying.
For my Deaf son, Alex, there’s no difference between a spider and a fire alarm. He understands what panic looks like, and he knows when I’m in one, but unless I sign why (which is difficult under the circumstances of real panic), then all he can do is wait until someone explains what the commotion is.
I could, and probably should, install special warning alarms in the house for him. The doorbell (first I’d have to get a doorbell) and the smoke detector are the two most obvious things to alert him of. I haven’t bothered yet because he’s never at home alone. And equipment is expensive. Just an alarm clock that either shakes the bed or lights up (which only works in the dark I’m guessing) …scratch that. I just looked up the cost of one at Walmart and he wants a Spiderman one. They don’t make them. On with a search.
But I digress. There are many circumstances in which a Deaf person can be caught short. Just two examples: alarms in hotels don’t normally exist for the Deaf, and a bomb threat in a shopping mall would leave a Deaf person who was out alone wondering which way to run. We don’t realize how much we rely on our hearing.
Again, another reason for having more people in society who know some sign language. So many things to advocate for, so little time.
My A to Z theme concerns the joys and challenges of being the hearing mother of my Deaf son, Alex. To learn more about his beginnings in life, click here to go to my first A to Z entry.
Though my son, Alex, observes much more than most of us in the family do, there’s at least a quarter, if not half, of what the rest of us perceive that he misses, being Deaf. While we hear things that go on around us without having to see them, (right now there’s a car going by with a rattling trailer on the back, and my other son, Chris, is coughing upstairs in his room) Alex’s world is quiet. He only knows what is in front of his face. I know this, because I often accidentally sneak up on the poor kid and scare him out of his erps.
I think of him in his own little world, not knowing what’s going on around him, and I find it natural that we end up calling him, “Your Majesty.” He’s self-centered in a way that makes sense. And yet he still finds a way to be in tune.
That he has compassion, even though I’m not able to explain to him what compassion means, tells me that teaching by example goes so much further than speaking. Openness begets openness, caring begets caring, and love begets love. This, unfortunately, can also be said for close-mindedness, rejection, and hate. To me, it speaks in volumes about how we all need to behave around our children.
Kindness is as often shown in gestures as it is in words. We can express kind words to one another without meaning them, but the sincerity of a smile cannot be faked. Nor can the act of opening a door, or handing back a lost item that a person doesn’t know he or she has dropped. I’m happy to have not only been able to demonstrate these qualities to my son, but I’m grateful to have been able to expose him to other people who have as well.
My A to Z theme concerns the joys and challenges of being the hearing mother of my Deaf son, Alex. To learn more about his beginnings in life, click here to go to my first A to Z entry.
I remember the first time someone called me using TTY plus Telephone Relay Service. The way it works is, the telephone company has a hearing interpreter with a TTY (teletype) device between the hearing person and the Deaf person. On the Deaf person’s end, they are either watching the interpreter sign on screen, or reading on the device. In between, the interpreter is listening and signing or typing, and on the hearing person’s end, he or she must speak and then say, “Go ahead,” when finished. It’s a complicated, and at first awkward, but effective method of communicating.
I also remember the first time I spoke to a Deaf person through an interpreter face-to-face. Again, awkward. First, I wasn’t sure where to look. When the Deaf person signed to me, I was able to watch and listen to the interpreter at the same time. But when I spoke, the Deaf person watched the interpreter. I wasn’t sure who I should be looking at. I’ve since gotten a bit more used to it. Second, I never know how fast to talk. I get caught up in watching the signs, and when I catch one I know, I realize how far behind the interpreter is, so I slow down. …or is he/she behind? There’s the backwards grammar to take into consideration too.
I didn’t have to deal with any of this until we moved to Ontario and Alex was enrolled in a Deaf school. Appalling anecdote, that was part of what actually led me to move:
It took about a year to finally have a speech and language pathologist visit Alex at school. It was a regular, English-speaking public school in the Province of Quebec. He had a wonderful EA working with him there, by the name of Lise. She was with him all the time. She spent her lunches tube feeding him and playing with him, and she actually came out of town to visit the Deaf school with me before we moved. Lise is hearing, however, and was at about the same level of American Sign Language I. We both knew it wasn’t enough for him to grow, so enter the speech therapist to advise on whether or not the school should fund an interpreter for him. The pathologist’s final assessment, after watching him in class a couple of times was that he couldn’t benefit from an interpreter, because at his current level of ASL, he wouldn’t understand the interpreter.
…
It’s like saying adults shouldn’t speak to hearing toddlers because they won’t understand anyway. How does one learn a language unless they are taught by someone who knows more, and is able to expand their vocabulary by example? And this from a woman whose job it was to teach language!
So we moved.
Since then, I’ve been muddling along, learning from what Alex brings home from school more than anything. We learned together, him by being exposed to ASL daily, and me from being exposed to my son. But we’re slowly getting back to needing an interpreter, and I don’t think it will be long before I have to have one at doctor’s appointments. He can now understand most things that are said in the adult world. At fifteen years of age he is still quite far behind mentally, but he’s a teenager. One of the most difficult things for me is knowing where his actual level of understanding lies. I have to rely on teachers for that. It’s like hosting a foreign student who I gave birth to, sometimes.
My A to Z theme concerns the joys and challenges of being the hearing mother of my Deaf son, Alex. To learn more about his beginnings in life, click here to go to my first A to Z entry.
When learning any language, we start with the basics, introducing ourselves, explaining where we live, etc. Then we begin to learn the names of things so we can ask for them. All of this is fairly straightforward. But when we learn a new language, we’re normally doing it for ourselves, for travel or to communicate with a native speaker. We’re not usually learning it in order to teach a child his or her first language.
While pointing and naming is all well and good, children ask why things are the way they are. It’s practical. How do we know the difference between the consequences of stealing a cookie versus running out into the middle of a busy intersection? Hopefully not by experience. Obviously, the consequences of getting hit by a car was something I learned to communicate to Alex early on. But what about the more innocent stuff?
Why is the sky blue? How do wireless electronics work? Why is this Russian/Korean/Indian show on my laptop but it’s not on TV, like The Price is Right is? (He watches shows from all over the world; spoken language is of no consequence to him.) I have no way to answer many of his questions, short of becoming completely fluent in Sign Language. The closest place to receive such an education is in Toronto (Ontario, Canada), which is too far to commute to, to take classes I have neither the time nor the money for at the moment.
I might have advanced my education more after Alex was born, but the courses in Ottawa only went to a certain level. On top of that, we lived in the Province of Quebec – a province that has its own Sign Language (Langue des signes du Québec). Finding a professional to teach Alex American Sign Language in Quebec was next to impossible, and the only Deaf school for children in Ottawa teaches LSQ. So we packed up and moved to Ontario, to a city with a school whose primary language is ASL.
I do hope to learn more Sign someday. For now, I’m doing the best I can with help from his teachers.
My A to Z theme concerns the joys and challenges of being the hearing mother of my Deaf son, Alex. To learn more about his beginnings in life, click here to go to my first A to Z entry.
My A to Z theme concerns the joys and challenges of being the hearing mother of my Deaf son, Alex.
When I discovered Alex was Deaf, I knew I would have to learn Sign Language. However, there was no point starting a formal education too early. I knew from experience that if you don’t use a language, you lose it pretty quickly. So in lieu of classes, I devised a few logical signs of my own. I think the first I ever taught him, before he came home from the hospital at the age of eight months, was to let him know when I was leaving and coming right back. I simply held my index finger up as I walked out the door. When I was leaving for the evening, I waved goodbye so he would know the difference. It didn’t take long before he needed to know why people were exiting his room; he began to cry whenever a nurse left, even for a moment. “Just a second” was the first of many I would have to teach the nursing staff over the years. I found the signs for “mom” and “dad,” and a few others so I could add to both my vocabulary and that of the people caring for him in the hospital when I couldn’t be there myself.
Even now, fifteen years later, it’s necessary to teach the nursing staff how to sign whenever he stays in the hospital. And not just one nurse, because signing is usually the last thing they have time to relate to each other when they change shifts. They normally have 15 minutes to go through the medical history and changes of all the patients on the floor. If Alex is admitted for a few days, there’s a fair bit of staff rotation. When a hospital is close to a border, such as the Ontario/Quebec border in Canada, the staff are expected to be bilingual, yet there is no provision for teaching hospital staff Sign Language. At the very least, it should be mandatory to have a reference book on every floor. I had to buy one of my own and lend it, always hoping it would come back home after Alex’s stay.
For a child without diverse medical needs, this would only be a problem occasionally. For us, it’s an ongoing concern. I honestly don’t understand why it’s not mandatory to teach Sign in schools. If you follow my A to Z, you may agree with me by the time the end of April gets here that they should.
The first time I heard Yellow Ledbetter, I absolutely loved the music. The lyrics, on the other hand, I would sing for years before I finally looked them up on the internet. In the meantime I, like probably millions of people around the world, sang in the car at the top of my lungs (when I was alone) what I thought they were.
Here they are:
“Yellow Ledbetter” Pearl Jam
Unsealed on a porch a letter sat.
Then you said, “I wanna leave it again.”
Once I saw her on a beach of weathered sand.
And on the sand I wanna leave it again. Yeah.
On a weekend I wanna wish it all away, yeah.
And they called and I said that “I want what I said” and then I call out again.
And the reason oughta’ leave her calm, I know.
I said “I know what I was the boxer or the bag.”
Ah yeah, can you see them out on the porch? Yeah, but they don’t wave.
I see them round the front way. Yeah.
And I know, and I know I don’t want to stay.
Make me cry…
I see… Oh I don’t know why there’s something else.
I wanna drum it all away…
Oh, I said, “I don’t, I don’t know whether I was the boxer or the bag.”
Ah yeah, can you see them out on the porch? Yeah, but they don’t wave.
But I see them round the front way. Yeah.
And I know, and I know. I don’t wanna stay at all.
I don’t wanna stay. Yeah.
I don’t wanna stay. [x2]
I don’t… Don’t wanna, oh… Yeah. Ooh… Ohh…
Now that you’ve read them, here is the song… with one of the most priceless sets of misheard lyrics I’ve ever come across. After you’ve watched/listened to the video, let me know which set you prefer.
My A to Z theme concerns the joys and challenges of being the hearing mother of my Deaf son, Alex.
Though Sign Languages are as different as spoken languages worldwide, one thing is consistent; they all rely heavily on body language and facial expression. I’ll never forget the first time I was shown the sign for “not yet.” I actually laughed at my teacher, thinking he was joking. There was a mortifying moment. “Not yet” is exactly the same hand-sign as “late,” only with the tongue stuck out. (For a visual: http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/n/not-yet.htm ) Anyway, by the time my son Alex started to learn American Sign Language I pretty much had my own face and body under control. Unless I’m angry, which is another story altogether. But when we go out in public, the results of people doing things without realizing it can range from amusing back to mortifying. For me. Alex has a blast.
For instance, almost any time I take him out, someone speaks to him. He’s a very engaging little boy. He smiles at people all the time. Invariably they ask him questions, and when they do, they smile back and usually nod their heads because they’re asking a positive question that they want him to agree to:
“Are you looking forward to going back to school?”
“Do you like Spiderman?” (Because he’s always either holding or wearing something to do with Spiderman.)
Alex sees them nod and smile and he nods back. He doesn’t need to hear the question. Which always puts me in the awkward position of having to decide whether or not to tell them he’s Deaf. Unless they ask him another question to which he would have to answer, for instance, “How old are you?” I don’t tell them. Why not, you ask?
People are embarrassed when they get caught talking to a Deaf person. It’s like they feel like they’ve suddenly made a fool of themselves simply by being friendly. When there comes a point at which I have to explain that the reason he’s not talking to them is he’s deaf, they either:
a) say, “Oh,” and walk away, pretending they didn’t speak to us in the first place;
b) say, “But he can lip-read, right?” because obviously he knew what they asked him. He answered the way they wanted him to! (I then say, “Yes, a little,” to ease their minds);
or c) whisper to me, “I’m sorry.” Depending on how I’m feeling on that particular day, I’ll either, say, “That’s okay, he’s just happy to interact,” or, “That’s okay,” and think to myself, Don’t feel guilty about it. It’s not your fault.
I sometimes wonder if, on some level, people know he has a good idea of what they’re thinking. Much of our body language is unconscious. We know we’re doing it, but we don’t always know when, or whether or not we’re controlling it well. And if that doesn’t make you feel self-conscious around a Deaf person, I don’t know what will.
Alex’s ability to read expressions gets embarrassing when he laughs at people. And he does, loudly and with great delight. Take, for instance, a scenario in which you’re out for dinner with someone you’re trying to impress, and you put something in your mouth that you discover you don’t like. You’re turning green at the gills but you’re trying to downplay it, so you grin and bear it while you continue to chew and swallow the offending piece of food. Meanwhile, at the next table, there’s a kid absolutely killing himself with laughter at the subtle expression you’re trying to cover up, while his mother, red in the face, attempts not to giggle at her offspring’s reaction.
All I can really do is try to distract him. I can’t say to the person, “He’s Deaf, and you look like you just put a live bug in your mouth.” It’s amazing how quickly people cease to be charmed by him in these situations. And they happen all the time. Of course I try to explain to Alex that it’s rude to laugh at people, but first, my vocabulary isn’t fantastic in Sign, so when he asks why, I’m at a loss. And second, how can I explain to him that he needs to suppress this wonderful ability to read subtleties that goes flying over the heads of most of the population? So I take it case-by-case and do my best to make everyone happy.
It was a question I and a few friends in high school used to like to ponder. It came up after an interesting discussion in one of my classes. We used to love to distract the teacher with such things – this particular discussion was about how you describe what is real, and how you prove it. One example was, if you’re talking on the phone with someone, how do you prove they’re real. You can’t see them. You can hear them, yes. But are they really there?
This makes actually far more sense now than ever before. What is “real” is far more a relevant question in light of the internet. We have Nigerian Prince-bots and people claiming to be someone they aren’t in order to lure people into bad situations every minute of every day. We can talk on the phone without being home: are we always honest about where we are? I’m not – at least not when my mother is on the other end of the line half the time. (Shhhh. Don’t tell her. I can’t edit.)
The wind. The wind is real. But it’s hard to describe.
It’s a scary world out there, and I believe it’s getting scarier. This reality changes our personal realities: or does it? If, when you were a child, you knew that nothing outside your front door could hurt you, and you walked freely, it meant that you were confident. If now you can’t step out the door without fearing your neighbours will assault you, it changes your level of confidence. Does your reality change your nature? Would it depend on how much time you spent in the wrong environment?
I feel nauseous just typing the name. But I’ve stayed quiet long enough. I find I have no choice but to speak out. Why, you ask? I realize the chances of changing the mind of anyone who is determined to put him in office is slim to none. But there are people out there whose voices might be heard. My ultimate plea is to those who can make a difference. Also, I feel by not saying anything, my silence in a way condones the possibility that my children and grandchildren will live in a far less free world than I have enjoyed.
I am Canadian. Let’s get that out of the way right now. I have no say in who becomes President of the United States. That is up to the conscience of the society south of my home’s border. But the fact is, the fateful decision to elect this man President will not affect only those within the U.S.’s borders. It will affect the entire world. Today’s events in Brussels and his reaction to them have magnified that.
Today he said he would close the borders; one assumes he means if he was in charge. On the surface, keeping outsiders out is a simple solution to a complex issue. Yet his talk of walls creates fear and encourages bigotry far more than it serves to protect. I know there are legitimate fears. But how do we fight fear? By being brave and standing together. Not building walls and hiding within them, never letting anyone else in. Just hours ago, he tweeted, “Time & time again I have been right about terrorism. It’s time to get tough! ” When he claims he will torture and kill the families of terrorists, and when he talks about waterboarding, he sanctions the very same methods of terror that the terrorists are using: violence to get a point across. He is attempting to turn America into a personification of himself: a cowardly, narcissistic little man who acts with great bravado until he is told he’s wrong. Then he lashes out. A true narcissist has no compassion. Anyone who stands in his way, whether they are Muslim, Canadian, or American, will be crushed. A true narcissist thinks the only thing that is “great” is himself. Make America great again, indeed.
The history books are filled with the results of propaganda such as that he spews, but again and again we forget history. Or we ignore it. And again and again we repeat it. In the next few days I will be writing a book review of Ken Follett’s “Century” trilogy. I was never big into history myself – I’d never go out of my way to learn it. But what I have learned by reading this historical fiction chills me to the bone. The parallels between the social unrest and widespread poverty in Germany leading up to the ELECTION of Hitler are, well, enough to make me come out of the political closet and write this article.
Today, while the present leaders of the world are pulling together their populations, and saying that while they will fight such terror as was perpetuated in Brussels, and earlier in Turkey and France among so may other places, they are also telling us not to allow the terrorists to bring us over to the side of hate. They are saying we need to look beyond the colour of our skin and our religious beliefs, and stand together regardless of our nationalities. The alternative is to fear those who are different, and build walls to keep them out.
Hatred begets hatred: two negatives do not make a positive. We teach our children this. Can we learn it ourselves? I hope we can, before it’s too late.
lindaghill.com 