Hi! I'm Janelle Whitford. I'm Deaf, my husband Curtis is Deaf, my parents are Deaf, and so were my grandparents on my mother's side. That makes me third generation. We live in Rochester, New York, which has one of the biggest Deaf communities in the country, partly because of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf here.

We have two kids. Maya is 8 and hearing. Theo is 4 and Deaf. Four people, eight hands, two languages, one very noisy dog who doesn't bother any of us except Maya. ASL is the language of our house. Maya grew up with ASL first and learned English from her hearing grandparents on Curtis's side, from school and from about a million episodes of Arthur. Theo goes to preschool at a school for the deaf, where all the teachers sign, and he chatters with his hands all day long.

I teach ASL classes for hearing adults at a community college two nights a week. Curtis runs a printing press, which was a trade a lot of Deaf men went into in his father's generation too. I went to Gallaudet (it was still Gallaudet College when I graduated, in 1985). In March 1988 I drove down to Washington with three friends to join the Deaf President Now protest, and I was there on the campus when the board named I. King Jordan the first Deaf president in the school's history. I cried so hard. That week changed a lot of things for Deaf people, and it changed me.

DEAF WITH A BIG D

You'll see I write "Deaf" with a capital D. Small-d deaf means you can't hear. Big-D Deaf means you're part of a community with its own language, history, art, jokes, clubs, schools and ways of doing things. Lots of us don't think of being Deaf as something broken that needs fixing. We think of ourselves as a language group, a little like an immigrant community that's been here for a very long time.

ABOUT ASL

• ASL is a real language, with its own grammar and word order. It's not English on the hands. Your face, your eyebrows, where you put signs in the space in front of you and how you move all carry meaning.
• It isn't universal. British Sign Language is a completely different language. ASL is actually related to French Sign Language.
• That's because of history. In 1817 Laurent Clerc, a Deaf teacher from France, and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet opened the first permanent school for deaf children in America, in Hartford, Connecticut. French signs mixed with the signs American deaf people already used, and ASL grew from there.
• Fingerspelling is spelling English words letter by letter on one hand. We use it for names and some words, but most of ASL is signs, not spelling.

MYTHS I'D LIKE TO RETIRE

HOW OUR HOUSE WORKS

• The doorbell flashes the lights. So does the TTY when somebody calls. The smoke alarms have strobe lights.
• For hearing people who call us, there's the relay service: an operator reads our typed words out loud and types back what the hearing person says. The Americans with Disabilities Act made relay service available everywhere in the country.
• Every TV 13 inches or bigger made since the middle of 1993 has closed captions built in, thanks to a 1990 law. Before that we had a decoder box on top of the set.
• My alarm clock shakes the bed. When the kids were babies, we had a light that flashed when they cried.
• E-mail and ICQ have changed our lives. I can chat with my Deaf friends in Texas at midnight without anybody in between.

MAYA, OUR CODA

A hearing child of Deaf adults is called a CODA. Maya is proud of it. She's bilingual and she knows it. But we are careful not to make her our interpreter. At the doctor's office, the bank or the school, we ask for a professional interpreter. Under the ADA, hospitals and many other places have to make sure they can communicate with Deaf people, and that often means an interpreter. It is not an 8-year-old's job to tell her mother what the doctor said.

IF YOU'RE A HEARING PARENT OF A DEAF BABY

I get e-mail from you every week, and I'm so glad you found us. Most deaf children are born to hearing parents, so you are far from alone. You'll hear a lot of different advice from a lot of people, and the big decisions about things like hearing aids or cochlear implants belong to your family and your doctors. Whatever you decide, here's what I ask: give your child language as early as you can, and please learn ASL with them. Meet Deaf adults. Come to a Deaf event. Let your child see grown-ups like them who are happy, working and raising families.

GOOD PLACES TO START

• The National Association of the Deaf, founded in 1880 and still working for Deaf people's rights.
• Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., which has information for families and educators.
• CODA International, for hearing children of Deaf adults, grown-up or not.
• ASL classes at your community college or local Deaf center. Your teacher should be Deaf or fluent, and you should go to Deaf events to practice.
• Books: Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries; Train Go Sorry by Leah Hager Cohen; A Loss for Words by Lou Ann Walker, a hearing daughter of Deaf parents.

Want to try a few signs? Go to my sign lesson for hearing neighbors.

Deaf, hearing, CODA, student, curious: e-mail me!
[email protected]


sets of eyes have visited since 11/98
Last updated Friday, September 10, 1999
© 1999 Janelle Whitford