I’ve read more than a few memoirs now (Deaf like me, Deafening for starters) where the child is completely isolated in a family of ignorant, if well meaning hearing people. The family is either unaware or afraid of sign language and they spend hours trying to teach the Deaf hero/heroine English.

I feel so sad for the families who do that in ignorance. And, I’m disgusted that families are being told to do that for their children today. Medical specialists are insisting that our precious d/Deaf kids aren’t capable of learning both ASL and English. Everyone really thinks that they are doing the best thing for their children.

I grew up less than 60 miles from Washington D.C. and Gallaudet. I was an activist from an early age, raised by parents who protested everything, starting with the Vietnam war in the 1960s. The 1988 student uprising at Gaulladet, wasn’t at the center of my senior year of high school, but it certainly left an impression. How cool that the students of a venerable institution of higher learning took over their own campus and got their demands met. I didn’t even remember what the protests were about until I took a beginning sign language class a year ago. And, of course, the significance of those events has become much more important to me now. Both, with the perspective of hindsight (or history) and the ramifications of what they accomplished for my own family.

Back to our story. I remember about a year before my DB was born I was taking a walk with a friend of mine who just found out that her niece was deaf. I was horrified to find out that her niece was getting an implant. Why doesn’t the family just learn ASL? She’ll get to go to Gaulledet when she’s ready for college. Case closed, everything’s settled. How funny, that I was going to get to make some of the same decisions in just a few years.

We are trying to be bilingual and I think we’re doing a decent job of being bicultural. We love our DB and we accept him for who he is. We’re proud of him too.

We’re teaching his sister how to sign and we hope that she grows up bilingual as well. Although we do hope that our DB stops tackling her soon.