I’m deaf and you’re not

Amelia, free spirit & proud deaf girl

I WATCHED her playing in the park by the ocean. Another little girl approached and asked her in a tiny voice, “Do you want to play with me?”

Amelia was moving past her and didn’t hear the question. The girl was shy and took silence to mean rejection.

I quickly intervened. “Hi there sweet one. Amelia is deaf so she didn’t quite hear you. Come over and ask her again.” I translated.

She was called Alexandra. With names and ages hastily exchanged they were off, running and laughing and joking like the oldest of friends.

I sat once more and drank in the simplicity of childish play. The natural rhythm of it. The ease.

Alexandra had a wand with magic powers deployed most usefully when she was tagged “it”.

Not to be outdone, Amelia held up her hair and declared triumphantly, “I have hearing aids. I’m deaf and you’re not.”

Her face shone with pride. So did mine.

Toy like her

Asking for the impossible?

PRE-CHRISTMAS discussion around gifts and the tricky scenario of matching the heart’s desire of an extremely particular six-year-old with those gifts.

Me: “What do want Father Christmas to bring you this year, chicky?”

Amelia: “I want a Barbie doll with hearing aids like mine.”

With hearing aids like mine.

Hmm, I thought. I don’t know if Mattel has made great strides in the toys-for-kids-with-disabilities space to date. Apart from a few limited edition examples, true diversity in Barbie-land seems a long way off.

But old Saint Nick has but one KPI and that is to deliver special goods to order, so as his best elf-in-training, I took up the challenge on his behalf. And I never fail at things like that. Ever.

Amelia is happy to picture herself as other people, imaginary or real. Some days she gets her super-hero vibe on with a bit of Spider-Man play. Other times she wants to act like a baby and be rocked and sung to, giggling into my chest as we pretend.

Kids are fabulous at dreaming up fantasy worlds. But often the most exciting thing for little people (and big people too) is when they recognise something of themselves in their peers, on television, or in books.

So imagine if you are a proud, bilingual deaf girl – and that fact is rather central to your sense of identity – but you hardly ever see that experience reflected anywhere at all. No characters with hearing aids, or who use sign language.

To understand what a critical deficiency this is, it is important to know that Amelia goes to a school for deaf children, so during the week she is surrounded by other deaf children and adults. It is the norm for her.

Yet it’s a rarefied environment, specific to her school life. In the bigger, more dominant hearing world, she is more or less on her own.

Thankfully the times are beginning to change a little, and a wonderful social media campaign (founded by journalist Rebecca Atkinson) for diversity in toys called #Toylikeme has paved the way ahead of us.

We don’t need to lobby toy companies to make Amelia’s doll-with-hearing-aids dream come true, because this movement already has with some success.

My favourite of the companies to jump on board with the idea is called Makies in the UK. They already create gorgeous dolls that can be designed to suit a wide range of looks, clothes (I love the archaeologist career pack) and accessories.

Now they’ve added a range that allows for another level of choice where hearing aids, cochlear implants, wheelchairs, birthmarks and so on are finally a possibility. I was all over it.

After I lovingly chose the specs for Amelia’s doll that shares her name, hair colour, sweet smile and quirky clothes sense, I clicked on ‘hearing aids – pink’. CONFIRM ORDER. Done.

On Monday, the doll version of Amelia arrived and she’s everything my girl (and I) had hoped for. I am beside myself with excitement to see her face on Christmas Day when they meet for the first time.

Just two cool girls with long blonde hair, dark eyes and hearing aids, hanging out together and wondering how Santa could be so switched on.

 

Signing Santa

Best. Santa. Ever.

IT’S THAT time of year again. Christmas is just around the corner and you can feel the urgency (panic) in the air and on the roads.

I’m steadfastly avoiding the chaos of shopping malls, except in the virtual world where you can shop at ease (and in your underwear) without being elbowed or causing a public scandal.

It was on one of my online voyages that I came across a magical initiative offered by a shopping centre in the UK called the intu Metrocentre.

Naturally, Santa was going to be dropping in to make a lot of generous promises for parents to try and keep.

And on two special Sundays, Santa would be signing to deaf children clutching their own dreams of bikes, superheroes and so much more.

I flipped over the sheer coolness of the idea, so unique in my experience as the parent of a deaf nearly seven-year-old who has reached peak Christmas excitement in 2015. I shouted my approval to the company from the rooftops of social media and to my delight, I received a wonderful surprise message in return.

How would we like their signing Santa to make a video message for our daughter Amelia?

Is the Pope a Catholic? You bet your life we would LOVE that, I replied. I was really bowled over by the unexpected generosity of their offer to us. There are so few deaf characters or stories in the mass media, but having the big guy from the North Pole fluent in sign language* seemed like a radical start to our festive season.

And about a week later, Amelia’s video arrived in my inbox. The proof of its worth is in the stunning, personalised Christmas pudding, provided by Santa and Mrs Claus:

Christmas morning will be full of lovingly chosen revelations for Amelia. But she has received an early gift this year, and its unique contents made her face shine with joy and unbridled excitement.

Amelia’s mouth dropped open when Mrs Claus mentioned her passion for Spider-Man (how did she know?). She followed the message closely and copied the signs she recognised about the reindeer and snacks for Santa and his helpers.

When it had finished, she pressed replay over and over, endlessly enchanted by it all. It’s simply a gorgeous video; we absolutely love it. Especially the bit where Santa tells Amelia to be a good girl and go to sleep on Christmas Eve.

If he could write that message in the night sky and hang some lights off it, that’d be awesome too.

*Although the message is in British Sign Language and Amelia uses Auslan, many of the signs were familiar to her so she followed it well.

 

Sphinx in the sand

SHE’S A ‘force of nature’ kind of girl. I sometimes can’t tell where the waves start and she ends. I try to call out to her and forget she can’t hear me. My voice travels in her direction until the wind grabs it and carries it away.

She’s not looking at me anyway. It’s deliberate, this ‘not looking, not looking’ game. No one is in charge but her and she’ll pay attention when she bloody well likes.

I only want to make sure that she plays in the sand near our feet. Just over there not all the way away. So I trudge through tiny shards of shells, slowly broken down from ocean to shore, just to reach her.

I talk to her with my hands. Come closer to Mummy and Daddy. You can play how you like, just stay nearby, okay? My child-Sphinx thinks on that for a second and then nods. It’s okay.

She runs behind me to our point on the beach and stays within the invisible flags of our agreement. I watch her, fully-clothed, splashing and laughing in the water, and say to my husband: “She’s ours, but she’s a stranger too, isn’t she? She belongs only to herself”.

He can only agree.

Deaf like me

Amelia, signing me a tale of whimsy

One of the most exhilarating and scary things about being a parent is watching your child grow and begin to understand more and more about who they are and how they fit (or don’t) into the world around them.

In the beginning, the concept of ‘who they are’ is largely defined by parental opinion and self-indulgent projections such as ‘oh, she has my eyes’, or ‘she’s strong-willed like her Mum’. She is in the world but she’s not her own person yet.

But at some stage, that child will break the shackles of the prescriptive parental narrator and strike out on their own path, discovering ‘who they really are’ on their own terms.

For us, that process is made even more complex by the fact that aside from personality traits, quirks and individual preferences, our five year old Amelia’s life has had some surprise storylines that she is only starting to uncover for herself.

She is deaf. She is also on the autism spectrum. These are weighty facts about our daughter that have taken us years to deal with and understand. We’re far from reconciled to their impact on her life and ours.

For Amelia, the journey to self-discovery is very much at its genesis. About her deafness, she knows that without her hearing aids she can’t hear music, television or clear voices.

In this, she has made an important connection between her hearing loss and the technology she uses to access sound and the world around her.

Then a few months ago, she referred to a teacher at her school as ‘deaf’ in speech and sign but when I gently pressed her on what the word meant, she was unable to explain.

No doubt at Amelia’s school for the deaf she sees, hears and signs the word deaf quite a lot, but it has understandably remained an abstract concept for her. She uses it as a label for people the way she might say “that man is old”, or “my friend is cheeky”.

I hold my breath a bit during these interactions with her because each time I’m waiting to see if the penny has truly dropped. You know, the day she finally asks me about her deafness, not just some vague, remote concept.

I’m also hyper-conscious about not forcing the realisation onto her, before she is ready. It’s one thing to learn that your daughter is deaf and to try and assimilate that word and its meaning into your own sense of their identity.

But this part of her story is not mine to tell or explain. It’s not my right to telegraph such an important fact about who she is. For once, I have to just shut up, listen and wait until Amelia works it out for herself.

Like yesterday, when she came home from school and spotted a picture of a toddler with hearing aids in a newsletter sitting on the kitchen bench. The conversation went like this:

“Mum, the baby has hearing aids like me…”

“Yes, he does have hearing aids”, I said.

“Mmmm”, Amelia pondered for a second and then said and signed, “I’m deaf”.

As usual, I held my breath for a few seconds and then said in a neutral tone, “Are you deaf? Show me the sign again Amelia?”

She signed ‘deaf’ once more. I softly asked, “And what is deaf, Amelia?” She didn’t say.

Then I asked, “Who else is deaf, Amelia?” to test her understanding and she began to list the names of her classmates, all of whom are deaf.

And then quick as a flash she broke the spell that seemed to hang over our chat for a minute and ran off in pursuit of another game and the brief moment of self-realisation came to an end. I exhaled a long, slow breath and smiled.

I’m not sure how much closer she is to understanding what it means to be deaf but it felt like a big deal to me, the first time my girl said that she was deaf. It is no longer an abstract concept that lives outside of her experience or a random label applied to somebody else.

Amelia has begun to comprehend more about who she is, only part of which is being a deaf child. I am sure that once the penny really drops there will be stages when she has different feelings about what deafness (and ASD) mean to her identity. To her sense of self.

But whether it’s a heads or tails proposition, my only job is to hold her hand as I always have and listen and answer her questions with absolute honesty. Like when she asks me if I’m deaf and I have to say no even though I secretly wish I could lie and pretend we are the same.

Out with the mould, in with the new

Do you have anything in beige?

When my daughter Amelia was nearly two and a half, we had her first appointment to be fitted for hearing aids. It’s a big milestone day that one, making the cutting of teeth and other family firsts seem trivial by comparison.

This event was the start of something scary and new, from which there was no turning back. In the two months prior to her deafness being diagnosed, we’d floated anxiously in the no-man’s-land between knowledge and action.

We knew Amelia was deaf but nothing else changed in the weeks that followed. The news just didn’t feel real until the post-diagnosis machinery cranked into gear and Amelia received her hearing aids.

I remember the trepidation I felt, the anxiety that hovered behind me during all of those initial ‘big’ appointments like a dark shadow.

How would we get Amelia to sit still for the mould impressions to be taken? Would we remember all of the instructions given to us?

Thankfully, everything went smoothly and our girl sat statue-like while a strange green substance was squirted into her ear, forming the individual shape of the moulds that would hold her new aids in place.

The audiologist started talking to us about the aids themselves, how they worked, how to put them in and so on. They were a lot smaller than I thought they would be which I remember brought a feeling of relief.

At the time it seemed important that the physical load Amelia would bear on her tiny ears be as light as possible.

Then the audiologist talked us through the choice of colours for the aids and the moulds. There were aids in purple and electric blue and pink moulds that looked like hard candy. They looked sensational but we were not quite ready to be such exhibitionists on our child’s behalf.

On that day, our instinct was to be as conservative as possible, with the standard clear moulds and a discrete silvery colour for the aids chosen for maximum concealment. They would be tasteful, even ‘classy’, but they would never win any prizes for fun (and neither would we).

Back then we cared a little about just how noticeable Amelia’s aids would be to other people. Her ‘disability’ had no other visual signifier beyond the technology she would have to wear every day for the rest of her life.

So, we chose to be boring, to be safe. In the car showroom we were not the people pressing our faces onto the windows of showy luxury vehicles. Nope, we were wearing sensible, knitted cardigans and talking to the salesperson about ‘longevity’ and ‘practicality’. Eek.

Fast-forward three full years, almost to the day, and I’m glad to say that my daughter, far braver and more interesting than us, has cooler ideas about how to drive her hearing aid choices.

There is a special style of coloured ear mould worn by some of the kids at Amelia’s school for the deaf that has not escaped her notice this year. Some kids have a different colour for each ear, while others sport dual-coloured moulds instead, kind of like a Yin Yang pendant. Only, you know, nice.

One of the older boys on her school bus – a unique and beautiful child we are lucky to know – has grey and green moulds that stand out in his ears like sea-coloured whirlpools.

Amelia observed these strikingly individual choices in first term and started reciting the names of the children with different mould colours to me from time to time.

Then one day out of the blue she told me she needed new moulds. Maybe in colour. She was quite coy about her request at this point so I said, “well, we just had new ones made over the summer and they fit just fine, so maybe later in the year”.

But Amelia had taken the idea to heart and she wasn’t about to give up. New ear moulds. In colour. I gotta get me some of those.

About a week before her latest hearing test appointment, I reminded that it was coming up. “Don’t forget we’re going to see your audiologist, IS, next Thursday to play some more listening games”.

There was a brief pause before Amelia replied hopefully, “We get the moulds in purple and pink?”

I stopped mid towel-fold (or something) and smiled to myself. “You bet honey, we can ask IS if she has time to do it after the test.” Amelia clamped down on my semi-promise like a great white shark on an errant surfer – there would be no other outcome except satisfaction of her deep hunger for coloured moulds.

By the time we (with my Mum in tow) were sitting across from IS in her office, Amelia could barely contain her excitement. We tried valiantly to get her to engage in the test but she was too distracted, antsy and generally off her game.

After a frustrating ten or so minutes, she finally turned to me and pulled my shoulder close to her body and whispered into my face, “Ask IS about the new moulds?” Amelia often uses me as her go-between with people but I have rarely felt more urgency than the moment those simple words hit my cheek and revealed the true meaning of her poor showing at the test.

My Mum, IS, and I shared a laugh because we knew there would be no point trying to engage her any further that day. If Amelia wanted new mould impressions taken then, by George, she would have them.

My girl sat still, like that child statue of three years past, in anticipation of this self-directed step in her life as a hearing aid wearer. The green gloop was poured into her ear once more and she waited ever-so-patiently for it to set.

IS produced the colour chart for the moulds and Amelia confirmed the decision we already knew – purple and pink – to be made in the half/half style of her sweet friend from the school bus. It would take an agonising two weeks for them to be prepared and then delivered by mail.

It took all of my Auslan skills to explain to Amelia that some man in a back office wouldn’t be able to produce the colourful moulds on the spot. She kept saying, “No, we wait.” After some wrangling, she reluctantly let go of her heart’s desire and went off to school.

It was a rainy, cold day on the school holidays when the magical delivery finally arrived at our house. I secretly retrieved the envelope from the letter box and attached her new moulds to her aids while she was in the bath.

When Amelia was dried and dressed, she waited for me to bring her aids back to her in the bathroom. Barely containing my own excitement, I carried them in behind my back and asked her to guess which hand held the prize.

Her eyes lit up with instant understanding and delight as she pointed to the left. No, they must be in the right.

I wish it was possible to capture for more than a moment the unbridled joy that shines out from a child’s eyes when they see something special they’ve longed to have and hold in their hands.

It’s a sight that never fails to reach deep into my chest and pull so hard on every heartstring, it’s almost painful. Almost.

But the look on her face when she tried on the new moulds for the first time, well, that was an image I wasn’t going to lose to fading memory. I snapped some photos as she preened (truly) in front of our bathroom mirror, so very proud of her custom-made bling.

Everywhere we went for the next few weeks Amelia would race up to friends and family to show them. She was busting to get back to school to now be a part of the cool kids group who have cut loose from the clear mould crowd.

We are so lucky to be able to send her to a school with other deaf children like her, who are learning together how to express their identities through things like their hearing aids.

They are not ashamed to wear them or have them noticed. On the contrary, they want to shout at the world in loud colours from rooftops, “look at me!” It’s thrilling to see Amelia’s personality and independence take shape through the choices she is beginning to make on her own, especially where her deafness is concerned.

At age five, she knows quite a lot about aids, implants, Auslan and even the sign for ‘deaf’, but she is too young to understand the combined significance of those things in her life. That process is slowly unfolding, inching closer to comprehension every year.

But seeing her assert herself so strongly and positively when it comes to ‘owning’ her hearing aids makes me worry less about how she will cope with the eventual knowledge of being deaf.

Amelia has a ‘come at me’ attitude to most things and I suspect on this score she will not waver. Only time will tell.

In the meantime it makes me happy to realise how far we have travelled from our (short-lived) days as conservative parents of a newly diagnosed deaf child.

I love to pile Amelia’s long hair high on her head so that people will see her aids. Yes, she is deaf and we are genuinely proud of that part of who she is.

And as usual, our daughter is light years ahead, taking us with her to the sky and back on the crest of an exhilarating purple and pink wave that never seems to crash before a new one rises again, brighter than before.

Now, hearing

It’s murder on the dance floor.

Before bedtime last night, my daughter Amelia was doing her usual interpretive dance routine and entertaining us with her best jazz hands followed by the deepest of bows and an enchanting flourish of her hand from brow to floor to signal its choreographic end.

Her avant-garde performance, matched only in its breathtaking awkwardness by Marty, the Dude’s ‘artistic’ landlord in The Big Lebowski, was accompanied by music she had chosen herself. Born Ruffians, if you’re asking.

It’s music she couldn’t really hear as she doesn’t wear her aids at night after her bath. However, like many things in her life, Amelia digs the need for tunes to complete the picture, the context for a show. People dance to music, and so does she, whether she can fully appreciate it or not.

It certainly doesn’t affect her enjoyment of dancing and she knows music, rejoices in it when aided, so her imagination and failsafe memory lend her the rhythms (well, motions) where her hearing cannot.

After about five encores, met with raucous laughter and hearty applause from the couch seats in-the-round, our exhausted tiny dancer opted for a story break to catch her breath.

Amelia picked up her big, interactive book, Peppa Pig on Pirate Island, with its picture buttons to be pressed for character sounds and music that children can play as the story unfolds. You know, Peppa giggles on cue, there’s a jaunty pirate theme and on it goes.

Then something happened that we did not expect, that we had not seen or heard before. After a few seconds of pressing the sound buttons, our girl spoke and signed, “Need hearing aids. Can’t hear it.” She was not annoyed, it was simply a matter of practicality.

We just sat in stunned, wowed silence for a second, because this was the very first time Amelia has ever asked for her aids and explained why. That she needs them to hear.

She knows what they are and doesn’t like to be parted from them but I’ve been waiting to see when she would become aware of just what her aids are for. What they mean beyond mere objects we put in her ears every morning.

Last night was the night for a revelation of that anticipated cognisance of necessity.

Her Dad rushed off to get them as I sat, spellbound by my daughter’s sudden self-realisation – this emerging understanding of being without hearing. Of the connection between her aids and sound. Of being deaf.

As an audience, we could not have been more gripped by the scene playing out before us. She’d trumped herself in the post-dance segment of the evening’s activities.

Amelia nodded approvingly as the aids were finally inserted and switched on. Then she sat down again and pushed another Peppa-related button. Her voice was clear and true as she announced, “Now, hearing!” Yes, my beautiful girl. Now hearing.

Wired

For

Sound

What a moment this was for us and for her. I wonder all the time about when Amelia will begin to understand that she is deaf and what this means to her life and her identity.

There are many more layers of this process to come for her and I have a feeling none will be as matter of fact as this one.

So last night represented an important first – the first time Amelia seemed to know that her ears do not operate the way ours do and that she would need something extra to let the world of sound in.

She’s so used to enjoying books, movies, music without the aural reach provided by her aids but this time, it wasn’t enough.

Amelia may have chosen to dance as usual to music mostly lost on her ears but she’d have her Peppa Pig pirate tale with the sound, thanks very much.

It’s a blackboard jungle out there

Nobody ever thinks that you’re going to send your child to a special school. You know, you don’t wake up and think to yourself, I really hope my child gets into a special school. That’s just not how we are is it? I think I’ve changed.
— Sara James (‘A Place for Us’, Australian Story, 12 August, 2013)

The road to school is paved with good intentions (and a lot of hope)

I recently watched this episode of Australian Story and the above quote from Sara James, mother of a young daughter with a disability, stopped me dead in my viewing tracks.

Because a variation on her words could so easily have been spoken by me about my own little girl, Amelia, who will begin her primary school years at a school for deaf children.

We certainly didn’t think we would end up sending her to anything other than a mainstream school. Going to any other kind of school wasn’t on the list of hopes we had for her before she was born, but like Sara James, I have changed my mind about how I feel about this too.

You see, Amelia’s deafness and autism (and their impact on her development) make it impossible for us to plan her school years more than 6-12 months ahead. Right now, we know where she’ll be next year but after that, it’s hard to be more definite.

The pre-birth notion of mapping out an arrow-straight educational course for her, from attendance at the small local kindergarten in the church hall a few streets away, to the nearby primary school we liked because of its bright, new buildings and wide open spaces is now just a fanciful set of ideas turned to dust.

Thankfully, we didn’t have enough time to really take those places to heart before we understood that for us, and for Amelia, the path of life would never be so clear-cut or sure. We have also worked out that institutional structures won’t always be central to our truest, deepest wishes for her.

What do we care about brand new buildings now, or the ‘best’ scholastic reputations or keeping up with the expectations of others? Not a goddamn thing, because when the goal posts move to the margins you have to start playing a different game – the long game.

It’s funny how far my attitude to this situation of uncertainty has evolved in a period of just two years, as we have adapted to two life-altering diagnoses before Amelia is five years old.

I will never forget the first question that popped into my head when the audiologist at the Royal Children’s Hospital opened the floor to me after we found out that Amelia was deaf: “Will she be able to go to a normal school?”

Normal. I would cringe at that word now, but back then, I seized on it without thinking twice. But in that room, ‘normal’ was just a code for the life I had imagined for Amelia while it slipped through my hands in a matter of minutes.

What I really wanted to know was, “Will she be able to live the life I expected her to have, just like everyone else? Do I dare to hope that despite her deafness (her difference) that her life will be easy enough to navigate? Please, will she be okay?”

I admit it was a desperate grab for a slice of optimism about the future. I’m sure my questions, both articulated and unsaid, are not uncommon to those parents who have found themselves in a similarly dramatic position.

My panicked mind flew years ahead to school because it was an obvious point on our family timeline where I imagined the normality of our lives would truly be tested. Before then, the outcomes for pre-school aged children are much more private and far less scrutinised.

If school age represented a big fork in the road, I didn’t want us to take a hard left while everyone else got to turn right. We’re most of us pack animals at heart, and never more so when trying to slot our children into the ‘safety’ of the herd.

The audiologist reassured me, “Yes, with lots of work on her speech and language, Amelia will catch up by the time she is six or seven. She will be able to go to a mainstream school.” At the time, there was no reason to think otherwise.

So, I clung to that small promise for the next two years. I had to believe that if we just did the tough yards of early intervention and speech therapy and everything else, we would emerge from this temporary blackout and resume normal programming.

But something happens to you over the years of taking your child to appointments and tests and scary places you never thought you’d be. You grow into it, you stop resisting and you begin to accept this life as the real one, the one you were meant to have.

It started in no small way with Amelia’s time at her three-year-old bilingual (Auslan and English) kindergarten run by the Aurora School’s early intervention service. It gave me a chance to see first-hand the benefits of a bilingual learning environment tailored for deaf kids.

Far from emphasising difference, this program offered its charges the security of shared experience. It gave them multiple ways to communicate (sign, speech, gesture), exposure to a wonderful Deaf role model and the freedom to develop at their own pace.

I watched Amelia embrace the visual communication that helped connect her to people, places and things. That kinder year laid some important foundations for her when she needed it most.

By the time she was four, it was clear that Amelia still needed a lot of support to develop her speech, language and social skills. There seemed little point throwing her into the deep end of a mainstream kindergarten three days a week just so I could walk her there and console myself about ‘normality’.

We chose the bilingual deaf kindergarten on our side of the city because it is a 20 minute drive away, and is part of a primary school for the deaf so there’s lots of expertise and support available.

Three of Amelia’s classmates from Aurora joined her there this year, so she’s been able to follow a group of friends through the early stages of school life. In this, we count ourselves very lucky indeed.

Hand up who’s ready for school next year?

Seeing my daughter’s growth in stature and self in this class has filled me with a happiness I did not dare wish for at the start of the year. It is so clear to me that she has found a soft, enriching place to land while being challenged to learn and play in novel and stimulating ways.

At this school, deafness is the baseline, the common denominator. It defines what is the same about her peers, not what is different. It requires no explanation; it is simply understood and catered for in every possible way.

Amelia is talking and signing so much more every day and is fast outstripping her mother’s knowledge of Auslan. She’s even started correcting me when I try to copy a new sign she brings home with her at night. Cheeky little blighter.

My girl will turn five in January next year and I did not think that she would be ready for school, any school, by this age. The recent diagnosis of autism didn’t knock us off a straight line because we’ve never known one. It merely confirmed to us that there is still much work to be done.

I thought perhaps Amelia would repeat another year of kinder, play it safe for a bit and see what the following year might bring. Being a January baby I could have reassured myself that she was entitled to an extra twelve months of development under her belt.

But her marvellous kinder teachers were having none of this overly cautious, pessimistic stuff. It is their strong belief, and I do have faith in their opinion, that Amelia is ready to make the leap to the big kids’ part of school.

It helps that our paediatrician and child psychologist support this assessment and agree that a bilingual school for deaf children is the best place to ‘super-charge’ her progress.

Although this decision made me a little nervous, I couldn’t feel more supported by all of the people who count. I soon realised how low risk our choice was while paving the way for so many benefits and rewards.

I took a tour of the primary school and current Prep class last week and discovered it has four children with the teaching shared by two people (one deaf, one hearing). Not fourteen kids or ten. FOUR.

I had heard that the numbers were small but I had no idea just how optimally low they would be. The numbers are capped at eight, but five is usually the highest number. Now that’s a teacher-pupil ratio we can all live with.

The school already has a number of children who are both deaf and autistic so there is plenty of built-in specialist support on the spot and ready to go.

The primary school children have weekly speech therapy sessions and start to learn more formally about deafness and Deaf Culture among the other programs like art and sport and music that make up the curriculum.

What this unique context means for Amelia is that despite her less-than-perfect start to life, at five she will be able to go to school with a handful of friends, one of whom she has known since she was three. They are a tightly bonded group and it’s thrilling to see them advance together.

Money can’t buy the kind of confidence and self-esteem that comes from progressing with your peers from one milestone to the next, no matter what your individual challenges might be.

In a specialised setting like this, every child gets a chance to grow and move on and up.

If the next 12 months are principally about taking stress off Amelia’s shoulders and helping her to realise her potential, then I couldn’t really think of a more suitable place for her to be.

No mainstream school with all the best intentions, good will and deaf-friendly technology can give her the same guarantees of security and personalised support, particularly at this most crucial time.

I do not see this choice of a school for the deaf as a compromise or as something below par, as I might have two years ago. We are choosing the right school at the right time for our daughter and her needs. Our family feels incredibly fortunate to be able send Amelia there.

If you’d asked me back in 2011 if Amelia would be starting school in 2014 and where she would be going, I would have answered, “I just don’t know.” But here we are, with our collective bags packed with books and excitement, ready for school next year. Prep is a happening thing.

So, I’ve opened my mind and my heart a little bit more, just a touch, to let in the dreams that Amelia’s ascension will bring. She will stand on our porch in her red and blue school uniform and have her photo taken and maybe I’ll surprise myself and be one of those mums who cries on her first day.

Or maybe not. But who even cares? Because my beautiful girl’s going to school, and baby that is a wonderful thing.

Further reading:
The brilliant Aussie Deaf Kids website has an informative overview of the types of schools available to families of deaf children. The general section on primary school is also a valuable one for parents with children entering into this stage of learning.

Portrait of a somnolent drama queen

“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Guess who’s coming to tea?

Amelia, tea party enthusiast (2012)

At my daughter Amelia’s deaf kindergarten, the teachers collect pictures and videos to document each child’s progress from term to term.

They’re candid observations about things like social interactions, learning skills and styles of play.

This week Amelia’s teacher showed me a video of an outdoor scene featuring my little girl and her classmates.

We had been talking about how she socialises with the other kids, particularly how she finds it difficult to join other children at play, and the teacher wanted to show me an example.

In the clip, it’s free playtime in the afternoon sun, and Amelia’s classmates are all engrossed in one activity or another.

Some are riding little bikes around a bricked path, others are messing about in the sand pit. A gang of three girls has set up an impromptu tea party under the dappled shade of a gum tree.

Most are playing in pairs, or at least displaying some sort of ‘togetherness’ or common aim, even when side-by-side.

And where is my Amelia? In this scene she is playing the lone wolf. A wolf in a red hat who is running around and around in wide, continuous circles.

There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to her running at first. She’s just running, well, to run.

Her slightly awkward running style (with a little bit of Kerry Saxby-Junna in the shuffle of her feet) and steadfastly upright gait made me smile as I watched.

Then it became clear that Amelia’s initially aimless path had shifted to track the direction of the bike riding boys.

She was trailing their course, dogging their journey, and running faster and faster to catch up. They were not aware of her at all.

Amelia had ‘joined in’ their game as a tail-ender, playing with them in her singular way, maybe the only way she knows how – just slightly behind, out of shot, waiting to see what the reception to her involvement would be.

Her impassive face briefly lit up with the thrill of the chase, the way we see it come to life at home when she’s playing the Cave Troll to my Frodo Baggins (about to be skewered again), or when she’s diving under pillows to evade her ‘terrifying’ Dad-turned-monster.

As she sprinted on, my eye caught a subtle move of her head and the flick of her eyes towards the tea party corner. Amelia had clocked them, this solid clique of three, but she didn’t seem to know how to approach, let alone breach their imaginary game.

So she kept on moving away from them, but her progress had slowed with the hesitation of someone wondering what to do next. Stay the course or stop to take tea under the tree?

The video clip gave no clues as it came to an abrupt end.

It was the briefest of snapshots of Amelia at play, but it spoke volumes to me about my sweet girl, who is so often happy in her own company but also desperate (and painfully unsure how) to interact with other children.

Amelia’s teacher continued the rest of the story that wasn’t captured on film that day; about how she finally willed herself to break into the circle of that exclusive tea party.

She sharked the girls for a bit, testing the water for signs of risk and making sure not to draw attention to herself.

I see her go through this same routine on kinder mornings when she is sometimes at war with herself about whether to sit in with the bus kids gathered for breakfast. On those occasions I am there to ask her what she wants, to encourage and guide her to a place at the table.

This time there was no one to smooth the way but she took the plunge and sat herself quietly down, making no fuss and speaking not a sound.

Thankfully, the girls were untroubled by her late decision to attend without an invitation. Amelia was a tea-party-crasher, yes. But she was a polite and deferential guest and so she was welcome to stay.

I see it as a triumph of her spirit, this small story about how a girl who hasn’t begun to understand the rules of social engagement punched on through her fear to join in with such a tight group of strong personalities.

And even though Amelia is light years away from being ready to ask to join in and participate on an equal social footing with her peers, I am filled with hope that without me she will eventually find her way.

To my eyes, she cut a wistful figure in that playground, running and running to show movement and activity (and because running is just something she loves) but I could sense that she was also looking, searching for a place to fit in.

Then I was shown one more clip that pointed to an alternative Amelia, one with the potential to be the confident leader of the pack.

She was up on the playground rise, near the fence line and had marshalled that same gang of three plus one to follow her in some invented game with undeclared rules.

It seemed to have only one premise: that all should join her in a conga-line of expressive marching along the fence line for as long as playtime allowed.

Amelia didn’t speak but her hands showed, nay commanded, the way; ‘Come on, come on’, they seemed to say as she urged them on. And follow they did, every last one.