Read: The bittersweetness of being deaf in a hearing family (via Medium)

Cristina Hartman, who has written for Limping Chicken before, has written a brilliant article about the ‘bittersweetness of being Deaf in a hearing family’, for the website Medium.com.

Here’s an extract below, read the full article here.

When I was 11, my 13-year-old sister locked herself into her room in a fit of teenage angst. Before she quarantined herself, she covered my parents’s bathroom mirror with post-its detailing their every transgression. As you might’ve guessed, there were many. One crime was that our parents paid more attention to me.

It was a complaint that all older siblings seem to have. This time, there was some truth to it. My parents, especially my mother, had spent a lot of time with me growing up. They took me to Sign classes so I could learn to communicate in a language that didn’t require that I hear. They got up when it was still dark so I could take the one-and-half hour bus ride to the deaf program across town. When I got a cochlear implant at age six, my mother would spend hours upon hours drilling me on sounds. That was the kind of attention I got but my sister didn’t because I was deaf and she was hearing.

As I read the note, a strange mixture of guilt and gratitude came over me. Gratitude for the grace and aplomb with which my parents had responded to my deafness. Guilt over what my sister felt because of my parent’s willingness to make room for me. Such is the bittersweetness of growing up deaf in a loving hearing family.