is a producer and curator of talks, broadcasts and animations. She was the senior producer of the RSA’s public events programme for more than a deca

As the hearing parent of a deaf baby, I’m confronted with an agonising decision: should I give her an implant to help her hear?

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2024-11-15 11:30:02

is a producer and curator of talks, broadcasts and animations. She was the senior producer of the RSA’s public events programme for more than a decade, curating a year-round festival that showcased the world’s greatest minds and ideas. She also edited and produced the award-winning RSA Animate and RSA Shorts series, which aimed to make robust, world-changing ideas accessible to everyone.

I knew my daughter could hear: not just because she loved music, but because she had perfect rhythm. She punched her fists in the air like a human metronome, and brought a doughy heel to the ground precisely on each down beat. I had thrown off the yoke of milestone-tracking months earlier, having become fixated on her inability to roll during the precise developmental week for rolling. So when she didn’t form consonants at the prescribed time, I made a deliberate choice to ignore it. It didn’t occur to me that deafness might not be an either/or binary, and that certain vibrations and pitches – the down beat of a Wiggles song, say – could be apprehended, while other subtle speech sounds might be snatched out of a sentence. So it was a couple of months after her first birthday when we discovered our Botticellian baby had mild hearing loss, and two years after that when she lost almost all of her remaining hearing entirely.

Like most hearing parents of deaf children, my first close relationship with a deaf person was with my child. Despite a relatively broad cultural education, I knew next to nothing about hearing loss or Deaf1 culture. What little I had absorbed was an incomplete and almost entirely inaccurate patchwork of pop culture snippets – the mother’s horror when her baby doesn’t react to the fire engine’s siren in the film Mr Holland’s Opus (1995); Beethoven’s struggle to hear the premiere of his Ninth Symphony; the lift scene in the film Jerry Maguire (1996); Quasimodo’s apparent industrial deafness; and, worst of all, the appalling memory of my university housemate imitating a deaf accent for laughs. This bleak landscape of ignorance and misinformation is often the lookout from which parents begin making decisions, as D/deaf critics have rightly pointed out. But although I began educating myself belatedly, it didn’t take long for the calcified layers of assumptions and approximations to disintegrate. Chief among them was the unquestioned belief that hearing loss, for an early deafened person, is even a loss at all.