…I learned how to tell the difference between my son’s cries by watching his face and feeling his chest. I learned to distinguish the need behind these sounds by looking for clues. My eyes and sense of touch began to differentiate my son’s cries and sounds by watching for the accompanying event, body language or facial expressions that went along with them. Ironically, because of my hearing loss, I became an extra attentive and responsive parent — not less aware, but more. I think every mother or father of a newborn has an instinctual “inner knowing” when their baby is trying to communicate its’ needs. This goes beyond disability…

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Deaf, Family, Health, Hearing Loss, Love, Meaning, My Story, Parenting, Support | 3 Comments »

Photo by: “dbking”

…Late-Deafened people are the kind of people who will sit through a full half-hour of captioned infomercials from Time Life Music, watching someone trying to sell music classics from our past. We LOVE those programs because it helps us remember songs we wouldn’t normally remember on our own…

…Even though I still sing to myself, I continue to feel an exquisite loss and tremendous void being unable to hear or sing music the way I used to. I can say without a doubt that the loss of music is the single, most profound part of losing my hearing…

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Deaf, Family, Grief, Hearing Loss, Late-Deaf, Music, My Story, Parenting | 3 Comments »

Photo by: “Melinka”

Most Late-Deafened people will tell you that our memory of sound is so strong that our minds can sometimes play tricks on us making us think we’ve actually heard something we haven’t….

…I know I wasn’t hearing a thing, but my mind heard every sound in detail. To this day, I continue to produce “phantom hearing” and attribute sounds in my mind in response to evocative visual stimuli….

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Deaf, Hearing Loss, Late-Deaf, Meaning, Miscellaneous, My Story | 5 Comments »