Alandra's Lilacs: The Story of a Mother and Her Deaf Daughter

11. Her Rightful Place

CHAPTER ELEVEN Her RightfuL Place ~ I am sure many parents would agree that the teenage years are filled with miscommunications and sometimes no communication at all. Even more problems arise when language barriers are added into the equation. Alandra and I had the normal spats typical of mothers and daughters, but usually we communicated well enough to just fight it out. As a manager I was usually in the store ten to twelve hours a day. I rarely took a day off. At night I brought work home to study sales trends or plan for sales events. My store manager dangled a carrot, reminding me that I wanted to be considered for a corporate position when the company relocated its headquarters from New York to Texas. After a day of putting out one fire after another, I often found myself exhausted in the evening. During conversations with Alandra I began to nod in reply instead of carrying on my end of the conversation. One day, gritting her teeth at me, Alandra signed, "Why don't you want to talk to me? All you do is sit there and smile and nod your head." I had unwittingly sent my daughter the signal that I did not want to talk to her. I tried to explain, but to a teenager it just doesn't matter. Today Alandra works a lot of overtime and I see her nod in response to her own children. I look at her over the top of my glasses and smile, nodding my own head profusely. Alandra laughs and says, "But they talk so much!" 93 Her Rightful Place Although I sign well enough to get my point across, I have never signed to my satisfaction-and certainly not to Alandra's satisfaction. When I start to sign, my mind hears the words I want to say, but I can't seem to convert the words in my mind to the pictures of sign language. My hands seem to act on their own, making incomplete or wrong signs, even when I know the right sign. Also, deaf communities in different areas often develop their own particular signs for the same word. I think of these almost as regional dialects. In Illinois, for example, you sign "nothing" with a closed hand at about chin level, and then thrust your fingers and hand outward. In Texas, the sign is made by holding both hands in the shape of an "0" and moving them left and right slightly. Another word is "farming." When Alandra was a little girl, we made the sign by holding the left arm with the elbow bent at the twelve o'clock position, rubbing the left elbow in a circular motion with the right hand. In Texas, the same word is signed by holding the left palm up (as though waiting for something to be placed on it) and using the right hand to make lines across it as though you were tilling a field. But although my signing is not perfect , I continue to sign to Alandra, her friends, and now even strangers. Alandra would only be totally satisfied if I could sign as though I were a native signer. Few parents are ever that good, although many sign much better than I do. In the evenings her only conversation was with a quiet Tom or an exhausted mother. Where along the way had I stopped putting forth the effort to make Alandra feel wanted? We began to look for shared interests. Alandra and I cross-stitched a tablecloth for Grandmother. Alandra had never done needlework before and she was a quick learner94 Her Rightful Place her stitches were tiny and perfect, much nicer than my own. It was a quiet time. The three of us shared a great love for books and read many of the same ones, but Tom and Alandra were never able to share much of the experience because of their inability to communicate. The two had an equal love for cooking and it was really their only common ground. Tom signed poorly and still relied mostly on fingerspelling . He is also quiet by nature, or as Alandra says, "very boring." Tom loves Alandra, but he is not very good at expressing that love. So during many of the evenings they spent alone Alandra felt as though he were ignoring her. Alandra felt left out and lonely, and since she...