The Place Between

As I have mentioned probably a million times before, I was born to the best parents for me, who both also happen to be Deaf. I was raised in Deaf culture, learned to sign before I could speak, and have always been the most comfortable with this language and culture that I love.

However, as a hearing person, out of necessity I also became a part of hearing culture when I entered school. After discovering that not everyone could communicate in sign language (one of my earliest, most devastating memories) I found myself stuck between two worlds.

During the day, I was a part of the hearing culture which I was also learning to love. Here, there was music, which touched every part of my soul. There were spoken words which added beauty to the language that I already knew. After school, when I would go home, I was a part of the Deaf culture that I loved. Here, there was family. There was an aspect of beauty to ASL that could not be translated into words that the hearing could understand in quite the same way. There was comfort at home and a strong feeling of belonging that, for me, was lacking at school. I couldn't find a way to build a bridge between these worlds that each held such joy for me.

One day in high school I heard a friend asking if anyone knew the lyric to a particular song. (Mind you, this is back in the days before home computers and the internet.) With the instruments playing and the way it was sung, it was difficult to understand. Well, I knew that lyric. I knew exactly what it said, because my brother and I watched MTV and VH1 all the time, and our television at home had a closed-captioning machine hooked up to it so my parents could read what was being said. (Again, back in the day before closed-captioning was standard in every TV.) The fact that I knew this lyric was a game-changer for me. I had an advantage over most hearing people because I was also a part of Deaf culture! Eventually, my friends figured out my secret and we would spend a lot of time at my house during lunch, watching music videos.

I ended up joining my high school cross country team because I was asked to, and I liked to make people happy. I had participated in a race at my junior high for the same reason. Our P.E. teacher reminded us that there was an 8th grade race after school and that she was disappointed that not many students had signed up to participate. I knew I was not good at kickball or basketball or dodgeball or any kind of ball. But running? Anyone could run, right? So I showed up after school in my sandals and ran the race, which meandered through the neighborhood surrounding the school. A few different times I was unsure of where to go, so I would stop and wait for the person behind me to catch up, follow them for a bit, then run on ahead. I came in first without really even trying. The cross country coach from the high school was there and he invited me to come run with the team over the summer, so I did. And I found that running was another thing to love. The cross country team became like another family to me.

High school was also where I discovered the magic of theater. I initially joined the beginning drama class because I loved being a part of the musicals our choir in middle school had done. The first couple of monologues I did had no substance to them. But one day our teacher, Mr. Scarlata, said something about becoming someone you are not on stage. About how you are not you when you are playing a role, you are someone else. And suddenly, it clicked. I fell in love with this idea, and the drama department became a place that was like home for me. The friends I made in my theater classes and the plays and musicals I was in were another extension of my family.

I sang, although timidly, in choirs throughout elementary and middle school. I remember a day when a friend heard me singing along to a song on MTV and said, "Wow, you have a really good voice!" It surprised me. I knew that I liked imitating the voices in the songs I heard on the radio but I hadn't thought much about it beyond that. After my freshman year my choir teacher, Mrs. Jensen, encouraged me to audition for the all-girls choir, Les Chansonnieres. I auditioned with a song I loved from The Sound of Music and was put in the soprano section. The year after that she asked me to consider auditioning for the top choir, Aristocracy. I sang there for one year until I auditioned again, this time with a song by U2 that I loved, Van Diemen's Land, and was put in the alto section. Here was where I found another family. A group of people who were as passionate about singing and music as I was.         

I was lucky in that my parents were very supportive of the hearing culture things we enjoyed. They let us listen to music, rather loudly, and enjoyed it with us. They would often ask us to sign the lyrics to songs, which I loved to do. They would come watch us perform in plays, with no interpreter, and my dad would cheer louder than any other parent there. However, this was not typical of the Deaf people we knew. Most of them, understandably, had no love for music or anything else that they couldn't understand. Wonderful interpreters have helped bridge this gap over time, but when I was a teenager it was difficult. There were no laws, no rights for the Deaf, no equal access to communication back then. The equal access in our family was dependent on me and my siblings and our willingness to interpret for our parents. 

I was also lucky in that my new "hearing family" were very supportive of the Deaf culture that was an undeniable part of me. My choir teacher, Mrs. J, asked me to sign a couple of songs that the other choirs sang during our concerts. When I auditioned for a solo one year she asked if I would sign it in ASL, too. One time we wrote monologues about a typical day in our life and after I performed mine with some ASL mixed in, Mr. Scarlata asked me about why it was important to me to include it and I was able to give a brief lesson on Deaf culture to the Play Production class. My coaches and teammates on the cross country team quickly learned that they could speak directly to my parents and I would happily interpret.

Over time I learned that it wasn't so hard to find a bridge between cultures after all. The bridge had been there all along, I just had to find it.

The bridge was me.