When Paris Was Her Lover by Heidi Harrison

Author:Heidi Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Heidi Harrison
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Three years later

1990

Essay: What does deafness mean to me?

by Gabriela Robinson

Assignment for Mrs. Burgee, Third Grade

California School for the Deaf, Berkeley

I could say that being Deaf is wonderful. And I could say that being Deaf is horrible. Both are true. There are days when I really don’t even think about it. It just is. And that is true too. It’s like having ten fingers and ten toes. It’s just a part of me, so why spend time thinking about it? But this is an assignment, and I always do my assignments.

I think it’s harder now that I am older. At first, when I came to the United States, a lot of other kids my age didn’t have much language, so I wasn’t that much different. Sometimes the hardest part of being Deaf is not about being Deaf but being so different from the rest of the world. And who wants to be so different?

Now I am in Berkeley, at a great school where everyone is Deaf. You’d think this would be easier, and in some ways it is, because we’re all Deaf here. And every single day we are signing, and our hands are flying out of the sky, racing around, and everyone here talks with their hands. So that’s cool. It’s like we have this very special place where we’re not different. We’re kind of all the same, but we’re not, of course, because each of us looks different. Some of us are what’s called profoundly Deaf—that’s my category—and some of us are mildly Deaf. And then there are all those in between. But we don’t think of those categories. We’re just Deaf. And the school is really good in not making any of us learn how to lip-read and try to “not be Deaf” and mix in with the hearing world. It’s Berkeley, after all, the birthplace of the free speech movement!

But then there’s the other side of the coin. Do you remember I said that being Deaf is horrible? Well, it is, in some ways. Because it means that most of the world has absolutely no idea how to communicate with you. It means that on a Saturday, when school is out, and you want to go shopping with your mom, you have got to depend on her to talk to people about what you want. You can’t just go up to the counter, with your own money you have saved from your allowance, and tell the clerk, “Please, ma’am, I’d like to buy this.” Either you do it silently, and the clerk tells you that you owe 25 cents, and you can’t hear her, or you’ve got to ask your mom to do the whole thing. And that’s really hard sometimes.

There was one time that I really hated being Deaf. My mom told me if I want to talk about it in this essay I can. I don’t really want to, though.

Thank God I’ve got a great mom. Some of the people in my school don’t have great moms.

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