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The Choice of DeafnessThe time had come to expand my family. My husband and I had been trying to conceive for a few years, but we finally decided that it did not matter if a child were biologically ours. We felt that adoption suited us, and we wished to adopt without much delay. Of course there was the question of my career. After seven years of graduate school and three as a visiting assistant professor at the United States Naval Academy, I had finally reached the point where I could qualify for a reputable, tenure-track position. If only I were willing to pick up and move to any of the fifty states and settle for an unknown length of time, for a job with no guarantee of a “good fit,” and a starting salary of less than half my husband’s current earnings. I knew that, as an academic, no matter how brilliantly I published, my chances of finding a local position with potential were highly dependent on luck. Thin luck. If we adopted one – or, as it turned out, two – institutionalized young children, I knew without a doubt I would want to stay home until they were in school. Betting that scholarly research and teaching would accept me back into the fold was risky business, but what really mattered to me? Since I am writing about our adoption of two toddlers, the choice I made is obvious. However, the unexpected influence of my academic background on the events that followed is part of what makes this story unique.After a few months of research, we settled on Ukraine as the homeland of our new additions. We found a woman to facilitate and translate our adoption process there, and I had the opportunity to meet her when she visited the U.S. During the visit, I told her that we hoped to adopt a little girl, or perhaps two, between the ages of one and three or four. “Well, there is one little girl I have been praying for,” she said, “Her name is Lena. She is very bright, and uncommonly beautiful. She has a way of coping with the orphanage and figuring out the routines before all the other ones do. She is very sweet and gentle, different from many of the others there. But she is deaf.” My husband and I had considered many behavior and health problems, diseases, and handicaps we would knowingly accept, but never had we imagined this possibility. After asking our contact a few questions, it was clear that this child was not mildly hard of hearing, but most likely had a profound hearing loss. Our Ukrainian translator described the way she looked at people’s faces when they spoke, watched their mouths move, and then imitated, opening and closing her own mouth silently, questioningly. This is the image that gripped my heart from the beginning. Lena was child starving for words and meaning, who would waste away in an orphanage unless someone fed language to her as only a mother can do. She was four years and three months old, and had no receptive or expressive spoken language whatsoever. Nor had the orphanage workers attempted to teach her any sort of sign language. She was as prelingual as a newborn. How would we communicate with her? How would she survive kindergarten? When parents first discover their child is deaf, there is usually a period of pain and grief that can last from a few months to years. Some parents never get over it. They have a beautiful, healthy, intelligent baby, and naturally there are expectations and daydreams about times to be spent with the child. Joking back and forth, singing a lullaby, reading to him at bedtime, nursery rhymes, old family sayings, word play, Christmas carols, talking about anything and everything while driving down the street with a little one strapped in happily…knowing one’s child can hear the words “I love you” and knowing the comfort it brings. All of these seem lost forever, and there is a very real shock, followed by potentially severe grief, which the parent has to work through while suddenly faced with an urgent need to research options in deaf education, schools, hearing aid technology, communication strategies, and coping strategies. The child’s whole future as a literate, educated, and socially well-adjusted individual are at stake. It is unquestionably overwhelming. In my case, however, there was no such grief. We chose to adopt a deaf child, so the decision was ours ahead of time. Once we made the decision, we had at least a few months to do the initial research. That was when I discovered that the average reading level for deaf adults, according to standardized tests, was the same as the average reading level for hearing children eight years old. I was determined not to let my child become one of these statistics. Surely, I thought, I could study sign language for several years, and learn it well enough to explain English grammar to a deaf person. Couldn’t a mom with a Ph.D. in English teach reading and writing to a deaf child? I soon saw the folly of this naïve plan.
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