Deaf Hearing Boy: An Overview

Abstract

Deaf Hearing Boy:An Overview R. H. Miller (bio) Out of this silence yet I picked a welcome, And in the modesty of fearful duty I read as much as from the rattling tongue Of saucy and audacious eloquence. A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.100–103 In this famous passage Theseus, the king of Athens, tells us that he has often been confronted by tongue-tied heralds who are unable to carry out their welcoming duties because they are frightened into silence at his presence. Yet, as he says, even by that cowed silence they communicate nevertheless, and he is able to understand what they mean to say, although they are unable to say it. Likewise, I can say that I have "read as much" in the silent language of the deaf people as I have heard in the clamorous sounds of the hearing people and have learned as much from it. In the summer of 2000 I finally got around to doing what I had planned to do for a long time: to write an account of my life with my deaf parents, Richard and Elizabeth (Sowers) Miller. Even though there have been several such books by CODAs (children of deaf adults), and some of them especially notable, I thought that perhaps my life would offer a new perspective on the relationship of what Paul M. Preston refers to as the H-D-H pattern of Deaf family relations—, of, that is, hearing grandparents, deaf parents, hearing children. Preston de-scribes this schema in his book, Mother Father [End Page 225] Deaf: Living between Sound and Silence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). Not surprisingly, the words poured out of me in a flood. I had kept my feelings pent up for so long that, now, at the age of sixty- one, all the years of mulling over my early life bore their strange fruit. That first draft was something of a muddle, but over time and with the help of colleagues and a good editor I was able to put my story before my audience in published form—in Deaf Hearing Boy: A Memoir (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2004). What follows here areIn this article I present excerpts from my book. This story follows my years with my deaf parents from my birth in 1938 until my departure for college in 1956, with a final chapter by way of bringing to a close my long association with them over their eighty-plus years of life. I hope that in some small way my experiences will assist students ofthose who study the Deaf culture in understanding more clearly the tensions that exist between deaf parents and hearing children and that they in turn will be better able to recognize the special needs of these children and their parents. The uniqueness of my experience with my parents is twofold. The first has to do with my family's nomadic journey from the farm to the city in late 1942 and back to the farm again at the close of 1949. It also concerns the deprivations we suffered when we had to leave the city, where my parents had depended on a large and flourishing Deaf community for social contact and support. The change was hard for my father to make, but it was devastating to my mother, who thrived on the gregarious life the city provided her as a Deaf person. The other has to do with the tension between my parents and me and between them and my grandparents, and as well as the chasm that separated their Deaf world from the hearing world of Grandma Amy and Grandpa Lloyd Newton. For much of my childhood and adolescence we shared a house, a farm, and a livelihood with my grand parents. This family construct constitutes Paul Preston's H-D-H schema (Hearing-Deaf-Hearing, referring to the difference in three generations, of hearing grandparents, deaf parents, and hearing children), as he describes it in his book Mother Father Deaf: Living between Sound and Silence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). [End Page 226] In this H-D-H construct, inevitably the hearing grandparents and...