I Can Hear You Whisper Read Online Free Page A

sound,” wrote Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, professors of communication at the University of California, San Diego, who are both deaf. “Sound is a comfortable and familiar means of orienting oneself to the world. And its loss disrupts the way the world can be known.” Deaf people, say Padden and Humphries, havea different center.
    They do, however, occasionally turn sound on hearing people, as in this classic deaf joke:
    A Deaf couple check into a motel. They retire early. In the middle of the night, the wife wakes her husband, complaining of a headache, and asks him to go to the car and get some aspirin from the glove compartment. Groggy with sleep, he struggles to get up, puts on his robe, and goes out of the room to his car. He finds the aspirin and, with the bottle in hand, he turns toward the motel. But he cannot remember which room is his. After thinking a moment, he returns to the car, places his hand on the horn, holds it down, and waits. Very quickly, the motel rooms light up—all but one. It’s his wife’s room, of course. He locks up his car and heads toward the room without a light.
    The joke is not on the Deaf man, of course. “He knows he can count on hearing people to be extraordinarily attentive to sound—to his gain and their detriment,” note the authors. More aggressively, when Deaf people want to insult each other, they can’t do much worse than to accuse someone of THINK-HEARING .
    But I am hearing. I laughed at the motel joke when I came across it, but I do use sound to orient myself in the world. I couldn’t just undo a lifetime of hearing overnight. Nor was I sure I should. Sound allows us to do some remarkable things.
    What I did acknowledge was that words and labels have power, and there is also power in the right to choose those labels oneself. That there were so many possibilities within the Deaf world revealed a complicated history that would take time to probe but that was brimming with both the pride and the tension of which I’d been only vaguely aware.
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    I could see that how deaf and hard-of-hearing children should be educated and, more fundamentally, how they should communicate are critical questions. “Deafness as such is not the affliction,” wrote neurologist Oliver Sacks, “affliction enters with the breakdown of communication and language.” Without communication, there can be no education. Communication provides contact and connection, a means of coming together. It allows the sharing of ideas and information. “Language really does take us everywhere,” neuroscientist Paula Tallal of Rutgers University, who studies children with language impairments, has said. “If we think about what makes us human and makes us able to function differently, ultimately, it is language; first of all language and of course subsequently written language. From the time we’re born, our interaction with our parents, our interaction with peers, our interactions with our sense of self are very wrapped up with the language system.”
    By “language,” I had always taken for granted that one meant “speech.”
    I certainly took it for granted in my parenting. Until Alex forced me to think about it, I hadn’t realized just how much I parent with my voice. I soothe and cajole, read and sing, teach and explain, reprimand, and occasionally yell. It’s how I hand down whatever wisdom I have, and how I answer questions, drum up interest, urge compassion, and encourage diligence.
    Could I do all that for Alex through sign language? If I were fluent in ASL, maybe. A language that Sacks described as “equally suitable for making love or speeches, for flirtation or mathematics” was no doubt also suitable for mothering. But the idea of raising a child in what to me was a foreign language was daunting. If we were to communicate in ASL, being hearing parents was a distinct