Letters

Letters Thumbs Up Mom and Dad! It was 1993 in late August and edging toward fall—when university campuses are in a brief lull between summer classes and school's beginning. I was going to have lunch with two colleagues, each of us eager to participate in the remnants of summer's semiunhurried days. With my brown bag in tow, I was left to select a table on the patio area outside the university snack bar while the others went inside to get carry out. Sitting down, I glanced over at the table I really wanted—in the shade—and grudgingly looked at its occupants. My glance lingered on the two men—one approaching middle age, the other in early manhood—because of their stillness. Was I sitting too close for them to carry on a conversation? Had I missed an earlier argument ? Were they two strangers sharing the only cool table? My colleagues arrived with their lunches and we quickly became immersed in conversation. My attention was again drawn to the shaded table when a woman carrying a tray of food joined the men. She quickly set out their lunches and began to talk softly to the older man and he to her—and I began to understand as their talk went on. It wasn't that they were ignoring the younger man; their eyes somehow had a way of making a visual sweep that included him but had no expectations of him. This was a family of hearing parents and their deaf son, here for the university's new student orientation. During one of my first years at Gallaudet, perhaps 1978 or 1979, on the morning of graduation, I was walking alone across campus to the breakfast offered to the graduates, their families and friends, and the faculty and staff. I was by the grassy quad walking behind a graduating student and his parents. The mother carried her son's robe. It was a very peaceful , early May morning. I recall thinking how proud all parents are at their children's graduation...and here was my first graduation at Gallaudet...and the family walking in front of me was what our work was all about. But then something pushed aside my wandering, lofty thoughts. There was a stillness to this threesome. None of the talking, signing, laughing, or nudging one expects to see was there. Instead, they were walking, mom and dad on either side of their son, looking straight ahead as though practicing the processional march their son would soon join. After all their years together was there still no communication ? Ironically, a few hours later so many of the students, most with hearing parents, crossed the stage thanking their parents and, with letters pasted-up on their mortarboards for all the world to see, said "I LUV U Mom & Dad." These events made vivid pictures in my mind. Surely I could never know about life in these families, but over the years since that first graduation , I have seen these pictures repeated time and again. So I am very troubled. My work for many years has focused on families with deaf children. I study the literature, do research involving families, and teach future teachers about developing partnerships with families with deaf children. We discuss the strategies of empowerment and collaboration and how programs can work to facilitate parent-child communication. Perhaps these concepts and the philosophical structure that binds them—which got national support in the 1986 passage of PL 99-457 (now PL 102-119)—did not reach the snack bar student and his family in time to make the critical difference in their lives. I can console myself with that belief if I also believe that we will see communicating sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers on graduation day 2010 when the 1986 babies affected by PL 99-457 walk across the stage. I won't be here on the faculty in 2010 but perhaps I will get an invitation to attend graduation; I would like to see for myself and I'll come early and walk across the quad. Back on the snack bar patio, the family was standing, picking up their trays ready to...