[ishabibble]

Bravo!

My older son was born deaf, it took years of surgeries and therapy to make him fully functioning in the hearing world.
I was supposed to cave in and accept his disability, but one look inside a School for the Deaf made me into the Mother I am today.

From learning to drive, to learning the medical jargon, to driving cross country to Cleveland and Standford, to the sheer grind of dealing with a deaf child were, upon reflection, a very small price to pay for my son's full hearing. I thank God for the technology and for the doctors, therapists, and Cleveland Clinic most of all, for my son's relatively normal life. He is a USMC, just back from his second tour in Iraq, and it is just a dim memory for him when we recently discussed this, because he hardly remembers any of it...and then I knew it was the right thing, so many years later.
People who don't know what it is to live in a silent world could never understand, IMHO. That was always my reason.

God bless and best wishes for you and your family.

p.s. Relax...those "gays" slip it into anything!

[papertyger]

What are applauding Star Traveler for? According to deaf culture, you robbed your son of his heritage.

The last thing deaf bigots want is a hearing child. I've heard of them actually avoiding childbirth unless they were reasonably sure their offspring would be born deaf.

That's not surreal, that's perverse!

[Star Traveler]

You said -- "My older son was born deaf, it took years of surgeries and therapy to make him fully functioning in the hearing world. I was supposed to cave in and accept his disability, but one look inside a School for the Deaf made me into the Mother I am today."

It is good for you and your family that you were successful in doing this. This enabled your son to be part of the hearing world. That made him part of your world, instead of being in a separate world (like it is for many deaf people).

If it had not been that way, he would have been different and he would have been in his own separate and distinct culture, no matter what you would have been able to do after that. But, you were successful and that is good.

There is a large group out there -- for various reasons -- who are deaf and will always be that way. It's not something that is going away. And while there are individual successes (like you've recounted to us) -- there still remains that deaf culture.

This is what people don't realize -- that it's a *different society* in understanding, in functioning, in perception, in relating -- in everything. It is *different*.

It's a big mistake to make "deaf people" to be "hearing people with a hearing deficit". It's not that way. They will never function fully in life -- with that kind of thinking. I can see it directly myself. This "understanding" that I have only comes from *direct experience* and not from any kind of political or any kind of motivation.

That's just the way it is....

Regards,
Star Traveler

[merry10]

My daughter goes to a very good school for the deaf. I wonder what your experience was then. That being said, I am glad your son can serve. No surgeries would have helped mine as hers is a sensorineural loss; however, she does wear an implant.