Insight: My life as an oral deaf person

I recently read quite a lot of backlash from the deaf community regarding an organisation that promoted an exclusive oral and aural approach to teaching deaf children. I felt, as someone who was brought up orally that I wanted to share my experience.

Firstly I want to clarify that I am not for or against any specific method. I would like to think as a 60 something year old I remain open minded about the great variety of deaf people I meet and the communication methods they use.

I grew up in a tiny village in the South of England and as such I really was the only deaf person in the village! My parents raised me the same way as my two brothers, with no special treatment, although I know my brothers were often told to look out for me when we ventured out together.

I didn’t have any hearing aids until I reached my teenage years and even then I still felt uncomfortable wearing them. I could hear enough sound to know if someone is talking, and then I used my lipreading to converse.

My family and I lived where there were fields aplenty and so my brothers and I could take ourselves off in the long summer days so I was lucky I had lots of freedom. I learnt to lipread my family and we had a few of our own gestures between us for certain things too, but it was not sign language as you know it, more like a secret code between siblings!

I learnt to use my voice well, my Mother would gently correct me if I happened to say something that wasn’t clear or correct but i never felt scolded or under pressure. Speaking and using the written word was all we knew. Nobody told us any different.

I trained as a tailor and enjoyed my job and eventually had the opportunity to move to a larger town for better paid work. Here was when I met my husband and together we raised our family, my deafness just being a normal part of living. It was even through an introduction from my husbands sister, my late sister in law, that I made my first deaf friend!

My deaf friend was a little younger than I was and she knew sign language too. She was a bright, exuberant lady who made me laugh and taught me a lot about deaf related things too.

My friend invited me to go to a deaf club for a social event, I had never seen so many signing hands in my life! I had no idea there were so many of us!

Unlike my friend, however, most of the people I met weren’t very friendly towards me. In fact, they were quite cold. My friend told me that the others couldn’t believe I was deaf as I was completely oral, my response really was that I really didn’t know any different.

I went back to the deaf club a few times but it was all rather too fast paced for me to keep up with anyone, I much preferred to meet my friend one on one. Sadly my friend passed away a few years later from a brief illness and I miss her company and chats very much.

I have noticed as I’ve gotten older that my voice isn’t always clear enough to be understood by others. I also know that lipreading for quite some time is tiring and occasionally impossible if I cannot see a persons lips. So even though I’m classed as being an oral deaf person, it certainly hasn’t made me hearing!

I think it’s important not to have regrets in life but looking back I wonder if I had learnt to sign at an early age or perhaps been welcomed more warmly in the deaf club, would I have had a much richer social life now? Perhaps.

I do wear hearing aids now and although I think they are marvellous and I particularly enjoy hearing my grandchildren sing and babble, they are far from perfect and I certainly wouldn’t say they enable me to hear everything.

Therefore when I read about organisations promoting an oral/aural approach only, I wonder how realistic this is. Is it realistic to expect a deaf child to sound like a hearing one? I certainly don’t sound the same as my (hearing) husband! It is also incredulous to expect a hearing device to turn a deaf person into a hearing one too. And what if the equipment fails to work?

The real message behind my story is that what saddens me is seeing the oral approach being sold as the best one for every deaf child. When I think back to my deaf friend who could converse in speech and also in sign, and how confident and joyful she was, I truly think she had the best of both worlds.

Even though I am oral, relying on English to communicate, I didn’t have a choice in the matter and neither did my parents. Back then life was much more secluded for us, and my parents did the best job they could with the knowledge they had. I don’t blame them at all.

Nowadays I enjoy discovering more about deafness and deaf people through resources online. I enjoy BBC2s See Hear also, and I love how it opens my eyes up to so many different deaf people. I still rely on english captions but my sign vocabulary is slowly improving. Old habits die hard!

It is always a delight if I happen to see or bump into another deaf person in the town I live in, I just wish I was better equipped to communicate in a multitude of ways!

Therefore my closing message is I hope parents of deaf children will allow their children to explore various ways of communicating as the oral approach is just one and it is a big old world we live in. Instead of being pro one method or against another, I wonder if a multifaceted approach is the best one for the diverse world we are in.

This blog has been written anonymously as part of the Insight series – where readers are invited to share their story or news about their interesting job with The Limping Chicken. If you have a story to share please email rebecca@rawithey.com 

Image courtesy of i-stock photos.