"How does Grandma Rae know how to talk?"
"How does Grandma Rae know how to sing?"
"How does Grandma Rae know how loud she is being?"
Those are the questions that Emma and Liam asked before bedtime.
I explained to them that it is not easy for children who have never heard before to figure out sound. I showed them how Deaf children are taught to speak. I held Liam's hand before my mouth and I made the 'p' sound. Can you feel that? Make that same breath on your own hand. Did you feel it? Now the 'n'. You feel the vibration of the 'n' on either side of the bottom of the bridge of your nose. Can you feel it? Deaf children learn how to speak by tactilely feeling and by seeing mouth formations. It's a lot of work, I explained.
"Tell the story of when Grandma went to school," said Emma.
I put aside Shiloh, the book we're reading as a family, to tell Grandma's story.
She was six years old when she watched her mother pack up their clothes, but she had no idea where they were going. Her mind was alive with curiosity, but she couldn't ask her mother the questions, because at the time little Rae Etta Marquis didn't have any words.
She rode the train with her mother. They rode for hours. She didn't know where they were going, but little Rae Etta trusted her mother. They got to what later Rae learned was the school for the deaf. Her mother went into the building to discuss matters with the house mother, meanwhile, little girls, also six years old, took little Rae to one of the bedrooms at the school dorm to look out of the window at the man in the moon. By the time Rae Etta turned around to find her mother, her mother was gone.
There was no way for her mother to tell her that she was leaving Rae there at the school and that they would not see each other for three months. There was no way for her mother to tell her that she would be happy, that she would learn words, or that she would finally be able to have meaningful friendships. There was no way that her mother could have told her that this was for the best and that someday the little girl would thank her. So, because those things couldn't be communicated, her mother left. Without saying a word.
Emma and Liam were alive with questions.
Why didn't her mother hug her?
Why didn't she go home again for so long?
Why ____? Why____? Why____?
I answered their questions the best that I could. Grandma Rae learned how to communicate, but never comfortably at home. Her parents never learned sign language. She came to long to be at school when she was home. At school she was free to express herself in a language that she felt the most comfortable with. At home she felt shut out. She was loved, there is no question that her family loved her. But getting to know each other took effort and work.
By the time I was wrapping up Grandma's story, Liam was wiping his eyes. "Please don't tell that story again." Liam, are you crying? He was.
Grandma Rae (6 1/2) and Roger (1 1/2) at Minnesota School for the Deaf. Note the red dutch hat that her mother made. Her family including her paternal grandparents came up to visit Grandma Rae at the School for the Deaf in Faribault, MN every year in March. This picture was taken on March 1945. She lost the hat at the beach along Lake Superior sometime in the summer of 1945.
10 August 2012
