A Christmas Story by LaRonda Zupp
Written by admin2 on January 3rd, 2009Filed under: Themes, Deaf Jam, Irked Videos
Join LaRonda as she shares her experience of being the lone Deafie at a family Christmas gathering, and how she coped. (ASL videoclip)
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Transcript:
Hello.
Christmas is now over. All finished. I’m curious, however, if any of you Deaf folks out there had the same experience I did. I was pretty isolated. Why?
Well, we had a family gathering of about 20 people, schmoozing and socializing. There were children and adults, old and young, and every age in between. I came in and was wished a Merry Christmas and glad tidings. I took my coat off, put down my bags, passed out the gifts, and then… no chats.
I felt pretty bored. It was so hard to lip-read. I felt lost. Conversations were happening all around the room, and mouths were flapping. I looked around the room often, hunting for bits and pieces of information, but only able to catch little bits here and there, until eventually, I gave up.
I tried to hang out with the kids who were playing around the place, but they wanted to play board games and I struggled to lip-read them too. Eventually, I gave up on that as well. What I found myself doing in the end was chatting on my pager with my Deaf friends spread all across the United States!
Honest to goodness! I saw many Deafies on line that day. Did that mean there were other Deaf folks who were lonely, alone or bored like me during Christmas time? That’s awful. Just awful. It feels sad. I wanted to chat and enjoy a social gathering, but being the only Deaf person at a hearing party is tough!
Now, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE my family. Truly, I love and cherish them, but, whoo. I guess I have developed a tolerance level, you know, of how many hours I can actually stay in that kind of situation. On that Christmas day, whoo! I stayed from about 9:30 in the morning until about 7:30 at night. I was bored out of my skull!
Plus, I felt that I appeared as if I were rude or uninterested or maybe as if I were stuck up because I didn’t engage in talking with others, but that’s not my truth. I’m not really a wallflower. It just happened to appear that way because of the communication isolation. It was just hard to be social and keep up with conversation.
And, sadly, no one asked me questions or made any effort to sit down and try to chat with me. No one. And so, I sighed a lot, put on a smiley face most of the day until I could no longer manage one. By the end of the day, I was exhausted!
Does this happen to you? It’s awful.
Anyway, it was nice to have a pager and THAT is how I managed to stay connected to my world—through paging you, my Deaf friends.
Bye (ILY wave) (Blows a big kiss)
6
PM
LaRonda,
Hi. Does your family sign at all? Maybe the kids in the family would like to learn to sign? Our entire family signs some. We learned to sign because one grandson was non-hearing. He also had a balance/vertigo issue so severe he couldn’t walk. Surgery gave him the balance he needed to learn to walk & it also gave him hearing. We still sign some, simply because we enjoy it. Maybe you could share this wonderful thing called sign language with your family?