Finding my identity... An intro

I'm new to Blogger. Bear with me as I get familiar with Blogger. I set up this blog so that I could write and express my feelings about my identity.

A bit about me: I was born in 1972. As a baby I was very sick and received Gentamycin, an ototoxic antibiotic, which resulted in a 60 dB hearing loss (I think - I'm double-checking with my mother). I grew up in the hearing culture. I'm the only member of my family who has a hearing loss. I went to an integrated preschool with hearing children and other hard of hearing kids. I remember being in a self-contained class with other hard of hearing children. I didn't think I had any adult role models at that time, so I was very surprised to find out years later (in my young adult life) that the teacher who was teaching me in preschool had a hearing loss herself. Imagine. I didn't know. Sign language was never used. She knew sign language but was not allowed to use it.

I had a friend in that preschool. We lived in the same school district and took the same taxicab home. She was 2 years older than I. We used to come to each other's homes quite often. She went to a deaf institute after graduating from preschool. I went to a hard of hearing program after I graduated from preschool. We must have been very different, if we were separated that way. I was not "deaf" enough to go to a deaf institute, apparently.

For convenience, I'm going to label "hard of hearing" HH, OK? I grew up in a certain way, so bear with me as I take you through my story. If this gets to be too long, I'll break it up in smaller sections.

I started elementary school in a local public school. I remember there being 5 buildings. One building was the administration building. There was a dentist on location. Another building was a self-contained "HH" classroom building, where there was an ENT on site, and a speech therapy clinic in the building as well. A third building was for "normal" children. A fourth building was for vision impaired children. And the last building was an "illegal" post-graduate school for HH children. My parents always joked and said that my school was full of vision-impaired, hearing-impaired and normal-impaired children. So, I grew up with the notion that there is no such thing as normal.

I remember being the only kid who had speech therapy EVERY DAY. My other classmates didn't have to go to speech therapy every day. Boo. Of course, they had better hearing than I did. I just remember that I hated that I had to go every day when the other kids didn't have to.

I was one of 7 HH in a self-contained classroom and building. We had every grade in that building. We were the same, as we all had similar hearing losses and similar communication skills. I was one of them. I fit in.

But once I reached the age of 12-13, I realized that we were different from "normal" people. That made me very sad somehow. We started interacting with true biz deaf people who knew sign language. But we had no way to communicate with them. And I had no way to communicate with hearing people, either. I felt out of place, really out of place everywhere I turned. The truth is, the group of HH people are smaller than the group of deaf people, which in turn are smaller than the group of hearing people. Some of my friends started to learn sign language. We started having sign language classes in school. But we never really became fluent in sign language. We actually had our own association, for HH kids only. But once we started hanging out with the deaf kids more, I felt more left out. That was not a fun place to be. Oh, and the teachers in my elementary school also knew sign language, but they didn't use it. Good grief. What's the matter? You know sign, but you're not allowed to use it? Interesting.

Second part to follow...