By Emma Schaefer
DUMB BOYFRIEND
I FaceTime my sister again. She didn’t pick up last time. Before her dumb boyfriend, we called each other every day, maybe even a couple times a day. The FaceTime rings and rings. I miss my best friend.
She actually picks up. What do you want? she says. I ask her if she’s coming home for dinner. She yells something to her dumb boyfriend across his house, who yells something at his crazy mother across the rest of his house. That would never fly at ours, I think to myself. Who is my sister becoming? That’s not how we talk to each other in our house.
I don’t like her dumb boyfriend.
YEAH
I have this fond memory of me pissing my mother off before she took me to preschool one morning. We had just turned off Elmo’s World and I got zipped into my puffy purple jacket by the back door.
The back door of our house went into the garage. It was in the basement, so you opened the door and had to go up a set of stairs to get to the ground level. My mom’s minivan and my dad’s black truck sat side by side peacefully. I dream about our old house sometimes.
Are you ready to go, Emma? my mom asks as she heads out the doorway. Yeah! I say. She whips around and looks me dead in the eye, the sound of the garage opening behind her. The smell of the garage, a little musty but mostly the smell of the snowblower’s gasoline and the black truck’s exhaust, wafts into the house. “Yes,” you say, she says to me. Yeeeeah, I say, smiling sweetly.
No, not “yeah,” “YES,” she repeats.
Yeeeeeah!
“YES.”
Yeeeeeah! She sighs, knowing that I think this is funny and she’s not going to win this one. I was always an argumentative child.
HONEYBEE’S PIANO
My mom hits a note wrong, but keeps playing—all of the notes are now wrong. Sometimes when she messes up, it sounds like she just misplaced her hand by one key on the piano, because every note is a half-step too high until she realizes it. I wonder sometimes if she is learning how to play based on her hand position, instead of how the note sounds. It’s not a wrong way to learn piano, but it’s just not how I did it.
She just realized it and started over. The notes are right this time.
My mom decided when my sister went off to college that her “empty nester” hobby was going to be learning how to play the piano. That’s what my grandma, my mom’s mother, did too. Her nickname was Honeybee. I don’t remember why. When she died, my grandpa didn’t want their old honky-tonk upright piano in the living room anymore. Everything that reminds him of her makes him sad.
That’s how we ended up with Honeybee’s piano. It was the first real one we’d ever had in our house; we got a dinky little keyboard when I was in kindergarten, and then a few years later we got a big electric one. We had to be able to turn it down because a regular piano hurt my mom’s ears. The first time I dusted the keys off on Honeybee’s piano and played it in our house, it warmed my soul. I played that piano every time I went to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, and now it was ours.
I’m so proud of my mom. She plays “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing” because it’s Christmastime. She’s getting really good, my dad tells me, a smile beaming on his face. She only started taking lessons a year and a half ago. Yeah, she really is, I reply.
PROPOSAL
We are going through all of the scrapbooks that my mom made over the years. She is trying to organize them, but all it takes is for us to crack the cover of one before we are distracted, engrossed in the memories.
There’s a black one I’ve never seen before. It’s from when your dad and I got engaged, she says. I start looking through it. They’re just babies, I think to myself. I’m nineteen; my mom was twenty in the scrapbook. That’s crazy to me. I’m nowhere near telling someone “I love you,” let alone planning a wedding.
My dad proposed to her at his parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. I didn’t know why my parents were there too, she tells me. Of course, after he got down on one knee it made sense. We watch a video of it; someone recorded the moment. It’s kind of hard to understand what exactly my dad is saying as he speaks to the crowd through a microphone, which is then encoded onto a 1997 video camera. I had no clue what he was saying back then, either, she tells me. My hearing aids weren’t great, and I couldn’t understand him through the microphone. I laugh. They got engaged early, after only three months together; my dad bought the ring almost immediately. It is funny to me that, in their whirlwind romance, she didn’t even know what he said when he proposed to her, but she still said yes.
AUSTRIA AND APOLOGIES
People who don’t know about my mom’s hearing loss ask me questions that I think are dumb. I’m in middle school and a new friend asks where my mom’s from; it sounds to them like she has an Austrian accent. That’s a new one, my mom says when I tell her later. I usually get Australian, German, or Norwegian. Usually some European country, except that one person thought she was from the Land Down Under. Americans really have no clue about accents.
I tell the person that, no, she is from the U.S.; she’s just really hard of hearing. She has cochlear implants now, though, so she can hear a lot better. Oh, they say. Sorry. The person shuts down and stops talking to me.
SESAME STREET
My sister and I would crawl into bed with my mom and dad sometimes in the morning. When they’d let us. We would watch the 6 o’clock news, and then my sister and I could watch PBS Kids. Sesame Street was on at eight. We didn’t talk to my mom while she was getting ready in the adjacent bathroom; if she was washing her face or doing her hair, her hearing aids were out.
NOT FUNNY
My sister and I were being loud, probably. I talked too much and she screamed for fun. We sang stupid songs, banged on our keyboard, fought with each other and played the radio too loud. We laughed a lot, too; my sister is funny and she often sends us into hysterics. It was all too much for my mom sometimes, especially when there were the added sounds of her making dinner in the kitchen. The frying pan sizzling, the microwave running, the water bubbling on the stove. She probably told us to be quiet, or that we were being annoying, or that we needed to go outside and run around the house five times. I probably said something along the lines of, we don’t need to quiet down, you can just take your hearing aids out! It was supposed to be a joke.
I don’t really make the joke anymore. My dad doesn’t, either. Sometimes my sister does, or my obnoxious uncle. Of course, now the joke is that she takes her cochlear implants out, not her hearing aids. She doesn’t need those anymore.
Whenever someone makes the joke, mom doesn’t laugh.
STATE SWIMMING
My mom was a great swimmer in high school. She was on the team. Her senior year, she even qualified for State, but she didn’t go because she was sick of it. Every once in a while, it comes up again and she’ll tell a story. It did this summer while we watched one of the swimming meets in the Paralympics. We saw someone out of the water tap the back of a competitor when they got close to the wall so they knew to turn; the swimmer had poor vision and couldn’t see where they were in the pool. That’s interesting, my mom said. I wonder what they do for the swimmers who are deaf. Well, what did they do for you? we asked her. She seemed almost taken aback by the question. Well… they didn’t do anything. We thought about it a little longer.
But, you didn’t wear your hearing aids while you swam, right? my sister asked. We knew she didn’t have waterproof hearing aids. Then, how did you know when to go at the beginning?
She wasn’t totally deaf; even without her “ears” in she could still kind of hear muffled sounds. But with all the noise and echoes of a pool house, she couldn’t have heard the starting gun.
I just watched everyone else, she said. When they went, I went.
My face crumpled up and my mouth fell open in a mix of awe and confusion, realizing what that meant in a competition. Sacrificing valuable fractions of a second, letting everyone else go before she did. Wait, so… you left the block late every time?
She shrugged as if to say, “that’s just what I had to do.” Yeah, I guess I did.
I sat there some more, stunned, silently wondering to myself how much faster than everyone else my State-qualifying mother could’ve swum if she could have started at the same time.
THE RIGHT WAY TO TALK
In my house, there has always been a right way to talk to our parents. And anyone, really. We don’t yell at each other across the house like some families do; we can’t shout requests or questions from room to room. It’s rude, for one, but when I was little we couldn’t even if we wanted to. Simply put, my mom wouldn’t hear us. We always face her when we talk; she has to be able to read our lips. We don’t mumble. We have to speak clearly and enunciate.
My mom and I talked about this the other day, how my sister and I grew up a bit differently because of this. People noticed it, she said. People would tell us how impressed they were by you girls and the way you would speak to them. For a long time, I didn’t really get what made us so different; we were just… talking? But I notice when people don’t speak that way around me. I can’t understand mumblers; I ask them to repeat themselves, saying “What?” a million times like I’m deaf, too. I notice when people yell questions at their mom across the house or up the stairs. I judge them for it, too. In our house, it’s disrespectful.
That would never fly in our house.
I CAN HEAR THE BIRDS
Mom is at the computer again, doing her therapy. She has to relearn how to hear and how to talk. It’s really hard, she tells us, and I believe her. The computer is in our basement, but the level is only half underground, so there are still windows. She sits next to them one Saturday morning, listening to the computer say words to her and then she repeats them back.
The surgery itself went really well; they put a magnet in her skull and a wire deep in her ear. She complained about having to take a laxative on the first day because she wasn’t allowed to push while she pooped, and she had this little shaved spot on her head where they put the magnet in. She doesn’t anymore though; that was just after they put the cochlear implant in. Now’s the really hard part: learning her own language all over again.
All of a sudden, she stops doing her therapy. She turns and looks at me. What’s that noise? she asks. What noise? I didn’t hear anything weird. That noise, she says, and then makes some squeaking squawking sound to mimic it. I sit for a minute, listening and thinking. Then I realize what she is talking about.
Mom, those are the birds.
Her eyes get wide. The birds? Outside?
Yes, I say.
You can hear them from outside? Even though the window is closed?
Yes, I say again, they’re really loud, they do this every morning… My voice trails off as I realize that she just never knew that we could hear that every single day.
I feel a pang in my chest, a bit of sadness and also a bit of pride. I see her eyes get a little glassy. I’ve never heard the birds before, she says.
I can hear the birds.
CHRISTMAS CHOIR
I love my mom to death, but she’s horrifically tone deaf. It’s not her fault, of course. She sings anyway, and I love it.
Sometimes I’ll hear someone play or sing a lullaby that my mom would sing to us when we were little. I recognize the words, but not the melody. That wasn’t how my mother sang it at all.
One year, our church put together a Christmas choir to sing during the Christmas Day service. When my mom told us she wanted to do it, I worried a little bit, I won’t lie. But the pride I felt inside because she wanted to sing in front of other people for the first time overshadowed my concern. Ten years ago, she would never have even considered it. My sister and I joined the choir with her.
The magic of a choir is that dozens of voices join to become one. Our little church’s Christmas choir was no exception. Our voices all rang out together, and the congregation sang with us. Some of the people in the choir sang harmonies, but we really all just sang whatever we wanted. And it sounded beautiful.
I hope my mother knows how proud of her I was at that moment.
GROWTH
The way she sees herself has changed a lot. A long time ago, my mom never would’ve described herself as disabled. She never identified as part of the Deaf community.
At some point, she started going to the HLAA meetings. That’s where she found out about the cochlear implants.
Looking back, I think she was looking for community. My family supported her as much as we could, but it isn’t the same.
The cochlear implants really changed everything.
My mom comes home from her job, excited to tell me about all the work she is doing with her disability advocacy group that she joined at the hospital. The health system is putting out a new workplace sensitivity training module and wants her advocacy group to weigh in on it. There was nothing in it about working with deaf or hard-of-hearing patients or coworkers. She brainstorms aloud with us the email she is drafting in her mind, spitballing how to respectfully tell the higher-ups that their training is lacking.
When I’m staying at my parents’ house, we ride into work together sometimes. I work just across the street from the hospital. Within the last year or so, my mom has started listening to podcasts while she drives. She never used to do that before. Do you mind if we listen to an audiobook on the way in? she asks me. She plays it, and it is a book about disability. I don’t pay close attention to it, I’m doing homework, but I make a mental note to ask her more about it later.
My sister isn’t with her dumb boyfriend anymore, thank god. She’s with someone else. He speaks clearly, respectfully, faces us while he talks and doesn’t mumble. We like this one so far.
We’ve all grown a lot. Especially since the time I started college. Sometimes we yell things at each other across the house now.
I have a physical copy of a book from my Gender & Women’s Studies capstone course. I don’t remember the title of it, but I know exactly where it is on my bookshelf. I saved it to give to my mom at some point; I thought she would really like it. It is a beautiful narrative that grapples with disability in different ways. My mom is learning and growing just like I am. I think it might be the right time to give her the book.
WHILE I WRITE
I ask my mom a few questions to help me remember better, and she says some funny things. I’ve heard German people speak, and… I don’t sound German, she laughs.
I sit here writing this as she practices on Honeybee’s piano. It is Wednesday. She has her lessons on Wednesdays. The holidays are over, but she still plays Christmas songs; I don’t mind. The Christmas songs were always my favorite to learn, too, and I would play them all year long. It drove my dad crazy. I don’t think he minds as much when my mom plays the same couple of Christmas carols over and over again. I think they both miss the way our house was filled with music before my sister and I left for college—we both played piano and were always incessantly practicing our pieces for concert choir, music competitions and the musicals we were in. When it came to our soprano solos, we were both perfectionists.
I finish writing and print this out for my mom to read. She only got through the “State Swimming” vignette when she stops and says, Emma, can we submit this to the State HLAA Newsletter? I think they would like this. You do a great job capturing these little moments, and lots of people don’t get it. She says she knows I’ll get an “A” on it. My mother really is something special.
I think Honeybee’s piano missed the music in the house, too. It sometimes sat for a while without being played. But since my mother started learning, its keys don’t collect dust anymore. The house is full of music, even when my sister and I aren’t home.
We are all so proud of my mother. I think Honeybee’s piano is proud of her, too.