nonfiction
When your first son is diagnosed with echolalia at age three,
with hypersensitive hearing at age five, with central auditory
processing delay at age seven, and when an audiologist
hands you a prescription for listening therapy at age nine,
sound both recedes and rises up. Sound becomes something
different, something foreign, something scary and dangerous
and impossible to stop. You cannot keep it from harming
your child, like you can (try with) peanut butter.
Sound changes for you the day you understand that
sound and everything connected with it—hearing, listening,
music, birds, thunder, laughter, crowds, the vacuum cleaner—
are not benign pieces of the harmless backdrop for a child
with ‘hearing challenges.’
Hearing challenges. That is the tidy way of saying
that you have a toddler who screams with jumpy panic
each time he hears a vacuum; that you have a preschooler
who repeats back to adults each word they say in order and
verbatim and thinks this is conversation; that you have a first
grader who is removed to the principal’s office before the fire
drill bell is sounded and sits with the secretary, his hands
over his ears, sobbing silently; that you have a 10-year-old
who stiffens and scrambles out of a Broadway theater and
onto a Manhattan sidewalk faster than you can follow him
when the orchestra strikes the opening notes to a play he’s
wanted to see for months.
But you also have a child who falls asleep peacefully
to the sounds of the Rainstorms CD (or a radio tuned to
static), who learns every word to any song he hears Dad
singing (Beatles’ White Album in heavy rotation), who can
tell his teacher when the art cart is approaching even when
it’s still two hallways away, who can repeat back to you
precisely what the rude clerk at the DMV rattled off when
you asked one too many questions.
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