BUG: Deaf Identity and Internal Revolution

Parenthood in the Blizzard

202 C H R I S T O P H E R J O N H E U E R Parenthood in the Blizzard When they were born deaf it was the D.C. blizzard of ‘03. Every means of getting anywhere buried under five feet of frozen slush; little American flags sticking up off the roofs of cars so the plows wouldn’t hit them. I saw more people on that day than I had seen all year— many offering sympathetic smiles or shovels. Route 1 is clear, they told me, but the walks are a bitch. Hopeless, because if you want real help, you need both the roads and the walks to actually get in and out of the houses. So the plows cleared immediate problems— you could barely find where you parked! No American flag B U G 203 is going to do the digging out for you. No authorities are handling emergencies on the small-scale. You can’t stand in line for an hour at the supermarket and buy a pizza, all the while pretending you’re able to make do, that if you had a cabin somewhere you’d be a modern-day Grizzly Adams. Could you really cope? When my children were born deaf I saw all the people in the streets with dinky little plastic urban shovels, completely inadequate. Everything snapping in half. Denial Rules Everything I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’m fat. I am, however, bulky in a semi-threatening sort of way. I will never play football for the Green Bay Packers, but I would make an excellent tackling dummy. I approach the dynamics of successful weight loss from what you might call the loser’s point of view. My idea of exercise is climbing out of my lounge chair to get a popsicle. And believe 204 C H R I S T O P H E R J O N H E U E R me, when I can afford one of those new chairs with freezer units built into the armrests, I’m buying one. I’m quite fatalistic about the power of denial, you see. It rules everything anyway; you might as well surrender. Can you imagine the expression on my face when I show up at the YMCA to do my first set of twenty consecutive jumping jacks in three months? You can tell I’m going to go home and weigh in afterwards. If I haven’t lost at least ten pounds by then, I’m not coming back tomorrow. A lot of nonsigning parents I meet have that exact same attitude . Their deaf child just turned twelve, and these parents are only now taking their first signing class? And what’s more, you can tell they won’t be coming back to class next week if they aren’t signing fluent ASL by the end of the day. I don’t want to hear that losing weight and keeping it off doesn’t come from doing twenty jumping jacks every three months. . . . It comes from permanently altering lifetime eating and exercise habits. Similarly, they don’t want to hear that communicating effectively with their child requires more than one sign language class—it may require years of classes. But true to our upbringing in the American culture of instant grati- fication, I want twenty pounds gone now, and they want their deaf child understanding them yesterday! Otherwise who has the time? But good luck explaining to them that it doesn’t work that way. And good luck telling me that if I don’t start exercising soon, my heart will someday explode in my chest. Denial rules everything, you see; and I’ll give you the same response that those parents will give you: “Yeah, yeah. I’ll get to it when I get to it.” ...