I Can Hear You Whisper by Lydia Denworth

Author:Lydia Denworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

17

SUCCESS!

In April 2006, a group of two- and three-year-olds clustered around our dining room table, propped on their knees in their chairs and leaning forward, Spider-Man party hats askew, so as to get closer to the cake.

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you . . .”

Alex had turned three. The deadline that Simon Parisier had set had arrived. We had gotten the cochlear implant in under the wire and already it was making a difference.

Nonetheless, the day was bittersweet.

The boys and girls celebrating with us mostly lived nearby in Brooklyn. As one- and two-year-olds, they had attended the same local child care center as Alex. They were a reminder of how much had changed in our lives.

I tried not to focus on the children’s chatter as they ate their cake, but it was inescapable. They were a talkative group.

“For my birthday, I got Spider-Man, too!” said one little boy. “He makes webs.”

“I’m going shopping with my mommy after this,” said one precocious girl.

“I love chocolate cake!” cried another.

Alex had blown out his candles with enthusiasm and climbed on the living room furniture with some of the boys. When you’re two or three, giggling is a universal language. But that was largely the extent of his communication with these children. When he did talk, I was usually the only one who understood him.

In the coming year, I didn’t know if Alex would see any of these kids at all. Up to this point, in order to preserve neighborhood friendships and maintain some normalcy, we had kept him enrolled in the familiar child care center near home—Jake and Matthew and some of their closest friends had been there, too. We’d been dropping Alex off there for the afternoons after his morning sessions at Clarke. As a three-year-old, however, Alex would be in Clarke’s preschool program all day and would leave the neighborhood behind. To make that work, I was even going to let him take the school bus, an idea that had appalled me when my friend Karen first mentioned it back at the very beginning of this journey. All my certainties about what was possible for a child Alex’s age had been knocked upside down.

Now I was (pretty) sure this was the right thing to do. At Clarke, Alex would have teachers of the deaf in the classroom who could do the explicit language teaching he needed, his speech therapy would be a routine part of his day, there would be audiologists on hand, and everyone in the building knew how to manage his equipment. We were fortunate to have such a school available to us.

But the decision marked the first complete diversion from the life we had imagined for Alex, from the life his brothers were leading, a life of growing up in our brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood, where I rarely got to the grocery store without seeing an acquaintance and where the boys rarely went to the playground without meeting a friend, where I could walk them to school every morning and wave to the same set of crossing guards for years.

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