Next: Octopus!

My mood over the past week has swung wildly. One minute I am misty-eyed over the outpouring of support we have received and the wealth of resources available if Simone does have a hearing loss, and the next minute I am hit with a wall of fatigue at the mere thought of everything before us.
Come, experience my neurosis in real time!

12:00 p.m.: ASL is a beautiful language! Each sign is like a tiny visual poem! This is going to be SO MUCH FUN!

12:03 p.m.: IT IS ALL TOO MUCH TO BEAR.

12:05 p.m.: I still remember how to sign the alphabet! And the word “shrimp!” The sign for “shrimp” is adorable!

12:06 p.m.: PANIC ATTACK.

12:12 p.m.: We’ll be able to mock people’s outfits right out in the open!

12:15 p.m.: Simone will think I can’t possibly understand her because I am hearing. Sayonara mother-daughter relationship.

12:16 p.m.: A teenaged YOU’LL-NEVER-UNDERSTAND-ME phase is a given, even if Simone can hear dog whistles and the flap of butterfly wings. I will woo her back with cash and my recipe for piecrust!

Keep in mind that for all I know, as I raced around researching Deaf culture and reading about the ototoxic drugs she was given in the NICU, Simone could hear every word I was muttering under my breath. But anyone who has been reading this site for any length of time is aware that I could teach my very own Community Ed class called Getting Ahead of Oneself: Advanced Proactive Anxiety Techniques ($40—bring your own paper bag to breathe into), so this is perfectly in character.

I have received so many wonderful comments and email messages from people involved in the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, and I have every confidence that Simone can grow up to be a wise, funny, amazing woman regardless of whether or not she can hear. I am frankly baffled as to why I reacted so strongly to something that, rationally, I know is FAR from disastrous, when in the past year I have frequently handled actual disaster with much less brouhaha. The only explanation I have come up with is something about a straw and a camel, and that after the long siege of the NICU and oxygen and everything else, I am just bone tired. That phrase has never seemed so perfectly apt.

Anyway, babies are mysterious. After the initial appointment, there was a lot of surreptitious clapping and squealing and dropping things to see how Simone would—or wouldn’t—respond, and the results of this VERY SCIENTIFIC testing were inconclusive. Once, Simone startled to a clap, but the elephant noises made by her bouncer, the sound of a mooing cow keychain, rattles—all left her cold. The bouncer incident came during my lowest point. We have had this contraption for ages, but no batteries for it, so on Friday we got some and Scott set it off. A great deal of infant-pleasing noise, meant to sound like a rainforest haunted by a mad xylophone, ensued. Any baby would have turned to see what was making all the ruckus—any baby but Simone, who didn’t notice it at all. I reacted poorly.

BUT. Simone has a favorite song, one I made up because I couldn’t remember the words to Oh I Wish I Were a Little Bar of Soap (Why WOULD someone wish to be a little bar of soap? Hence the unmemorableness of the lyrics, I suppose). Our song—Oh I Wish I Were a Little ‘Lectric Eel—has many, many verses, but Simone likes the first one best. I tried pretending to sing it, complete with animated facial expressions, and got no reaction, while an actual performance elicited a wide smile at the first instance of the word “eel,” just as it always does. So who knows. Until the 5th, my daughter remains a puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in succulent baby flesh.

In the meantime, I’ve taught myself the sign for “eel.” Added to the sign for “shrimp,” I am assembling a nice complement of language relating to marine life.