After having some time to cool off from the preschool teacher fiasco, I have decided that ignorance is bliss (as has been made quite obvious by the teacher's... Oh, stop it!) and I am letting bygones be bygones. My son absolutely loves school and I think I can let go of some inattentiveness if it means he gets to have a few hours a day playing with kiddos his own age. He gets so excited to get on the bus, and I have to admit that 4 hours of peace and quiet to get things done or just veg in front of the TV is absolutely wonderful. So preschool will remain a presence in our lives. At least for now.
We've come full swing into fall, as indicated by the fall book order catalog in my son's backpack. I'd totally forgotten about school book fairs and catalogs and fundraisers and... well, the list goes on and on! I've order nearly $200 worth of books. That may seem like sticker shock, but books are a wonderful thing and we just can't have enough. We've also dropped into the 30's at night, so out come the flannel sheets, footed jammies, and the smells of crockpot meals that permeate every room of the house. Nothing says home like walking into a warm house that smells of roast beef and vegetables. Well, maybe pumpkin pie, but its a bit premature for that.
Which takes me back to a story about my first experience being a single mom. Jace's dad and I were together from the time he was born until just after his 1st birthday. During this time, we had dealt with a lot: finding out our son was deaf in one ear, finding out he lost the other, and trying to make our relationship work while disagreeing on almost every parenting issue imaginable. Ah, hell. How I don't miss you. Which isn't to say that we don't have disagreements even now, but it is so much easier to disagree when your ex is 100 miles away. During our time together, though, I tried to be domesticated. I've never been a cooker. My meals came from my parents, a restaurant, or whichever box looked more appetizing. Prep time was 1 to 2 minutes, wait time was 3 to 10 minutes, and clean up was that handy dandy trash can that seemed to fill up every day, not that I could figure out why. Jace changed all that. It took time. It took burnt meals and a LOT of patience. But I've gotten the hang of it, and now I don't even use measuring cups. I've come pretty far. Don't go throwing ingredients at me and expect a masterpiece, but I am proud to say that the bulk of my shopping is done in the fresh produce isle these days.
The best part about becoming domesticated is the lessons you set forth for your children. Parents of hearing children have it easy. You say a word, they hear it, you repeat and eventually the child mimics it. For a hearing parent of a deaf child, you have to hunt down the words for everything. Try signing plantain or starfruit, I dare ya. I am still learning common words in the produce isle. And the problem with sign language is that they don't have a sign for everything. There are so many words that you have to finger spell. Which means you either spend the first year of your child's life diving deep into the world of sign (I hope you don't have to work for a living because you'll need all 18hrs of waking time in your day to learn everything in a year) or you have to be OK with the fact that your child will be delayed in learning some things. It can be very frustrating. Especially if, like me, you didn't begin learning sign in that first year because you held hope that your son's one good ear would remain good.
This is when you kick yourself over and over and over again for not being proactive from the day you learned of his initial diagnosis of unilateral deafness. Maybe I wasn't ready, didn't want to face the fact that my son would probably be deaf, as most children with unilateral loss end up losing the other hear, too. Maybe I was so consumed by my son's overwhelming colic and fussiness that I couldn't think of anything else for the first 5 months, then just focussed on enjoying him for the next 5 months before realizing he wasn't hearing me any more. Whatever the reason, the result is that I was unprepared to relate my son's surroundings to him through sign at a very crucial time of learning and language acquisition. He will be fine, and we are learning everything now, but we missed a very important developmental window and we can't get that back. Commence with the kicking.
So my advice to parents with deaf/hoh children today is to be proactive from day one. Hindsight is 20/20, and we don't get take backs. This ties into my ideals about parenting/teaching... Always be doing the very best for every child, and you won't have too many regrets later.
Until next time!
mom2jace
No comments:
Post a Comment