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Having just returned home from a fabulous CODA conference held in Indy - I keep learning new things about myself each year. This year, DREAM IT - LIVE IT! Today is my birthday - so if you like to give me a gift - subscribe to my blog! See up in the right side with the counter click on the email - you’ll never miss a vlog/blog! That would be the best gift ever!! My goal is 50 subscribers!
Trying out the new laptop while I make and post this video. Got some bugs to work out, it cut me off in the end, but the jist is I’M EXCITED!!!
The countdown is the toughest part, when others arrive before I do, I hear about it on our groups, FB and IMs. It starts to get me itchy. Can’t wait til Thursday when the road trip begins.
When I go to conference it feels like just a really comfortable setting. To be myself without that extra element of having to explain about my parents being Deaf. Some people really call it home. My parents are still living, but for those that parents have passed, I’ve been told conference gives them that part of them back. Several Codas are not in Deaf-related work fields and this conference allows us to celebrate our heritage along with Deaf heritage. We are a sub-culture of the Deaf community.
I enjoy no explain explain at conference! It allows me to just building friendships based on me, not first let me tell you all about the Deaf world. Oh and yes I like drama, cooking and gardening.
I’m excited to see my family!
Well, now that I have your attention - I’m talking about awareness a bit closer to home. It’s not on a big soapbox, it’s just one person to another. To me this post serves as a good lesson to be reminded of from time to time.
The world is made up of so many interesting and unique things to learn about. This stems from very intriguing people. There is a professional for every imaginable product, activity, or way of life. For years I tried to get hubby Carl to try new things. Actually on one of our very first dates, I wanted to eat Calamari, but he was totally against ordering it…so, I mumbled to the waiter to bring it. Since Carl is Deaf and had no idea that I ordered it, he was quite surprised. He tried it and now 10 years later he orders it whenever he can!
It’s about exploring, listening and tuning in to our environments. After years of asking Carl to try dance lessons, I finally got him to commit to a class with me. He did excellent, in fact - I’m the one that had difficulty with the Waltz steps, Carl grasped them almost instantly. See Dancing is Hard Work
My oldest daughter had a recital - this was professional! She was a little Eskimo - isn’t she cute!
Jean Wolfmeyer is a dynamic teacher, she’s turned out several professionals from our small little town. It doesn’t even compare to the other schools in the area. The recital was 4 hours! I knew I’d enjoy it, it had been my first time seeing her production. I was a bit concerned with Carl, not being able to hear the music, especially for 4 hours, I thought he might become quite bored. As the show got underway, each dance was beautiful, Carl and I would make eye contact and nod as to say “well-done”. At intermission, my husband and I were talking about the show and he shares how totally impressed and professional the gig is. Huh? Is this the same guy that wouldn’t dance with me for years… then I thought about it. Having taken the dance class gave him some idea of how difficult it is to dance. He had become aware resulting in having more appreciation for the art of dance. He also could see the distinct improvement in our daughter. (Jean is really amazing)!
Having had to field numerous Deaf related questions my entire life, I really don’t mind answering those trying to explore our culture of Deafness. I encourage their questions so that they can learn and share with others. So the moral of the story kids - open your emotions, feelings and curousity to the world around you. Explore and learn - without prejudice. Be a sponge and learn something new. Whether it be calamari, dancing or anything that you come into contact with today!
I met Shai on Facebook, through his sister Keren. We were talking and I had asked her to contribute to the blog. She is working on her first post (nudge, nudge) and mentioned her brother might like to contribute too. After a couple of emails via Facebook, Shai agreed to write for www.codadiva.com
Shai asked me, “what should I write”? I told him to write anything he felt like - in any style. I wanted to be just as surprised as all of you. Shai decided he would write an essay, and break those down into manageable posts.
After reading this portion of the essay, I found myself so very honored to know this young man.
A. Introduction
There was a beautiful woman called Jana Orbach who was deaf in one ear and almost deaf in the other. She was born completely deaf in her left ear and her hearing was slowly deteriorating (as is for all of us) in the other.
There is a very handsome and very tall man whose name is Menachem Orbach, who was born with two perfectly functioning ears, but, following a surgical procedure to cure his meningitis at 10 months old, his hearing was completely lost. Menachem is, in fact, as deaf as a deaf man could be. To illustrate his inability to hear, I could say that if you turn on your stereo and turn the volume as high as possible, he still won’t hear it.
Jana and Menachem are two people who made love sometimes in the late Autumn of 1984 and begat, doting and dazzled by their infant, the person who wrote these words, on the 28th of August, 1985.
Mom said it was an easy delivery.
I am Jana and Menachem’s second-born (to be followed by no other offspring), and my name is Shai Orbach. As a son of a deaf father and a hard-of-hearing mother, I proudly title myself as CODA, a child of deaf adults. Because my particular “CODA-ness” is a bit intricate (it’s not just “two deaf parents”, the hearing loss is not genetic, etc.) , I have chosen to begin this article in this fashion. From now on, I will focus mainly on what it was like to be an Israeli CODA, and what it is like, in general, to be a child of deaf adults.
As a short clarification of why it is that I chose to write of my parents in this manner, it is fit to mention that my mother passed away last April (April 1st, 2007), on the very same day I completed my 3 years-long IDF military service.
B. Childhood
It is hard for me to recollect much of what it was like being a young (infant, toddler, and eventually, boy) CODA. As an infant, I know as I was told by my grandmother and other family members that I was a quiet infant, crying very little and all-in-all, giving my two parents a good deal of serenity as is possible for any parent with a very young child.
My parents, at first, did not sign to me much, and rather chose (I would bet, due to family pressure for being “normal”), to communicate with me using their voices. This was not a big problem for mother, who was hard-of-hearing, and if I yelled really hard (even that eventually stopped working), she noticed that I’m calling her name. I did, however, knew sign-language enough for very simple conversation, so the reason my sign-language today is fluent (and is enough for me to use it for interpreting) is because I was exposed to ISL (Israeli Sign Language) from a very early age.
It is, unfortunately, also important to point out that the fact that mom and dad chose not to teach me ISL caused a major communication barrier between them and myself until young teenage, in which I began teaching myself the “missing words” in my vocabulary.
Regardless of the daily communication hurdles my folks and I had to overcome, we, that is, my sister Keren, myself, Shai, my father, Menachem, and my mother, Jana, were a rather happy, rather normal family.
The most “not normal” thing about my family, and notably the only thing outstanding in our family (in a country with a huge variety of sub-cultures and customs) is the fact that we were, in plain terms, Deaf.
I consider myself and my sister, with our perfectly functioning ears, to be Deaf. The capitalization of the word Deaf in this instance is not a bizarre typo. I distinguish between a person who cannot hear or interpret voices into meaningful units of speech (words) as “deaf”.(this is not my idea, but I can’t recollect to whom the credit for this usage belongs to)
This, of course, is opposed to a person who belongs to the subculture of the Deaf. One might be Deaf even if he/she is completely without any disability, or, for all intents and purposes, armless, legless, blind, and anosmic.
I was Deaf ever since I was born. I was climbing chairs as a little ankle-biter during deaf-parties, utterly silent excepting a roar of laughter or a sharp intake of breath, and, of course, the “tsk-tsk” noises often made by signers who use their lips simultaneously (as far as I know, the most common of all deaf people).
Due to the fact that I signed very little, and hence spoke very little to my parents, I was a very, almost pathologically quiet young boy. At one instance, I was examined by a psychiatrist who merely stated that I’m “gifted”, an ego-booster that members of my family mention quite often. At this point, I wish to say that if I am gifted in any way, I would like someone to ruthlessly pinpoint what that gift is, as I’ve been wondering all my life whether there really is a gift I possess. (Off-topic, the meaning of the name Shai in Hebrew is “gift”. Usually a small, unremarkable gift, but a gift, nevertheless)
Being a CODA is a huge, tiring, heart-tearing, emotionally-exhausting responsibility. A deaf parent should have a right, as any, to bear children and care for them, and, this I say of personal experience, have them well-bred as any other parent (and perhaps even better so).
But deaf parents must also be aware that their CODA offspring will endure the yoke of CODA at all time. This yoke is the ever-renewing “CODA task” that must be fulfilled. As young children, Keren and I learnt very quickly how to deal with bankers, technicians, correspondents, mailmen, neighbors, plumbers, etc. Needless to say, as two children who could barely sign, it was a bit short of a nightmare. But somehow, we fared through it. Keren managed most of the CODA work (but not all of it!) until I became a bit older. Then, at a critical point in every Israeli person’s life, Keren joined the IDF, which leads me to the next chapter of my CODA experience: Teenage.
C. Teenage
By my teens, doing CODA-work was something that Keren and I did somewhat alternately (with, I must admit, a bias towards Keren, older and more experienced).
When I was about 15 years old, Keren joined the IDF. I’m not exactly sure of the exact time when this actually happened, but at this point, it basically meant that at a time where “CODA-work” was plentiful, I was all-alone with two deaf parents. At this time, I decided it would be impossible to be their advocate without exquisite fluency in sign-language, and so, in about 3 months, I turned from an illiterate, mostly “lipping” CODA to a full-fledged ISL interpreter for both my mother and father, who, now older and more prone to medical care, daily required my help.
To explain what this period was like, I wish to introduce a term that I’m not sure exists in ASL (or in any other sign language that readers of this post might be using). In ISL, there is a word for “dad”, and a word for “mom”. The word for “parents” is, actually, a compound of these two words. Of this came the word between Keren and me, who, instead of calling them “the parents” (that’s the “Hebrew way of saying it”) –”momdad” (aba-ima in Hebrew).
So, as a lone CODA with a fresh (and ever sharpening) sign language, I became the mediator between my dad and the salesperson. I became the words in the mouth of the man on the phone, and my hands became the conduit for my mother’s part in the conversation.
I received, then, what I viewed and still view as the most noble of professions:
I became an interpreter.
To father, this was mainly dealing with the hurly-burly of his daily life. He dragged me down to all sorts of places.
To mother, to the very (painful) end, I became the man between her and the doctor. I signed words like “feces” and “menstrual blood” (at times in which I wasn’t exactly sure what these things were, but still knew how to sign). I took her to a myriad of clinics and hospitals to be examined and treated by a myriad of doctors, and have prescribed a myriad of medicine.
My mother, blessed forever be her indulgent name, was an ill woman. She became ill sometime during my early teens, I’m not sure which came first, the liver cirrhosis or the diabetes, but these two sufficed to create another (huge) responsibility for Keren and I: caretakers. We monitored her sugar-blood levels, and quite often accompanied her for the most meager of undertakings, and not, as it were, for “interpretation jobs”
Shai, thank you for opening up to us! I am in awe of some of your struggles, and can actually understand what it might be like, having Deaf parents myself. I’m also drawn to how you write with such imagery. I for one am truly blessed to have met you, and to learn from you. I’m intrigued to the meaning of your name, “gift”. I’ll be there when you finally discover it. It can only come from within - once you find it, you’ll know it!
Friends, I sure hope you will welcome Shai - I sure do want to find out more about his perspectives as a Coda living in Israel. Please do post your welcome!
It’s great to be supported when we need it, in tragic events, hard times and sometimes just because. The cultures of Deaf and Coda are so similar. I remember attending many events where the participation was large. It never occurred to me until a young adult some years ago. They went for the socializing, the place to be to speak in their native language.
As a Coda, both in the hearing world and Deaf, I found Coda support to be overwhelming. When I was feeling a bit disconnected in life, Codas helped by showing up almost immediately for a Coda “fix”. However when I find a Coda supporting me in a time when I’m not expecting it, like my online exhibition, it floors me with emotion.
I’ve heard about when there are tragic times, when a Coda’s parent passes, or is ill - the response by email and cards is overwhelming. Even if a Coda doesn’t know that parent - they send their thoughts and prayers. To be honest, it’s a bit mind-blowing. (I think this is going to get another post in the future).
How do you feel as Codas with the support you’ve gotten in the past? Has there been a time when out of the blue, there was a Coda - for no real reason at all?
On yesterday’s afternoon break, I took the kids to the library. While I was there, I decided to pick up some fun reading (rather than the reading I have been doing to launch my own business). My logic was, reading some books by other Codas might trigger some blog entries. I put in the search engine for the computer catalog and I couldn’t come up with much. Luckily I remembered Lou Ann Walker, A Loss for Words (by the way, I’m on page ten; I’ve gotten teary eyed twice). Thank goodness my overwhelmed brain could remember Lou Ann Walker. If I hadn’t I would have been empty handed.
When you search in the subject category for Deaf parents and hearing children it results with Deaf children and parenting. Other searches were about language. Basically, if you don’t have any Authors or Titles, you spend a great deal of time searching on the library’s system. So, now I have to go find my list, I know there is a list out there of books written by Codas. If you know of one, let me know. I am aware of In This Sign by Joanne Greenberg. This just gives me one more reason to believe, there is a long way to go before Coda can be known as its own culture. It is a culture, we are hearing, but we live in a Deaf household.
Note: When I get that list, I’ll be sure to post an update.
Lisa | 
08 7th, 2008| 
