Julia has everything under control until her daughter’s sudden deafness makes her question everything she knows about motherhood.
\nGrowing up in the Deaf community, I didn’t think twice about sign language. ASL was just another language, another mode of communication: a lucid way of expressing oneself visually. No different from how my Brazilian parents spoke Portuguese. Then I got a cochlear implant (a bionic ear that provides limited sense of sound) at age six and began attending conferences. At one such conference, a parent ran across a room in a panic when her child tried to sign with another child who communicated primarily in ASL.
\nI had heard about these parents—parents who followed the oral philosophy that emphasized spoken language above all else for deaf children. No sign language. The attitude mystified me. What was the harm in ASL? But the fear and anxiety on the parent’s face told me that she believed ASL would damage her child somehow.
\n“The Silence Between Us” began as an attempt at understanding that parent, an otherwise accomplished and loving mother, so I decided to write from her perspective, and I found myself simultaneously sympathetic and frustrated. Her love, so visceral and real, overwhelmed everything, including Kathleen’s perspective. No matter how I tried to balance their perspectives, Julia always centered her own, and I realized that was the point. Julia’s love and anxiety were so all-consuming that there was no room for anything else.
\nHere’s a passage showing Julia’s contradictions:
\n* * *
\nI remember one more thing: the 1988 protests at Gallaudet, that Deaf university in Washington. Tom Brokaw’s calm voice told us about how the board of trustees had chosen a hearing person over two Deaf candidates for the school presidency, outraging the students. They were not children, the students said, and should be led by their own. Their campus was a charming oasis of grassy knolls dotted with neat buildings, cordoned off from the surrounding neighborhood full of decaying buildings. The protestors took to the streets with their flying hands and DEAF PRESIDENT NOW placards; I wanted this for them—a small space to call their own.
\n“Isn’t that wonderful?” I said to Charlie.
\nKathleen appeared in the doorway, tall for a ten-year-old, immediately mesmerized by the television. Her fingers fluttered as if she was imitating what she saw.
\nI said it was past her bedtime, and her face shifted to her mulish look. Kathleen’s stubbornness still bubbled up from time to time. At the grocery store when she wanted sugar cookies. At the kitchen table when she didn’t like green beans. And that night.
\n“You could’ve let her watch,” Charlie said after I got back from tucking in Kathleen.
\n“It’s late.”
\n— “The Silence Between Us”
\n* * *
\nYou can read the full story in Kaleidoscope Magazine Issue 85 *Summer 2022) pp. 44-54, available as a PDF.
\nIf you have any problems accessing the story for any reason, contact me and I will send you an accessible version!
\n© Cristina Hartmann
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