When she was born, it was amazing. I just remember feeling joy, like nothing I'd ever felt before. A few weeks later, a nurse would say to me, "You don't know what love is until you have a baby." That was true for me.
During her very first physical by her pediatrician, 24 hours after she was born, the doctor noticed that her ear lobes didn't match. I had been doing nothing but staring at that sweet little bundle of joy so I was surprised I hadn't noticed.
"They don't match," the doctor said, "but don't worry - it doesn't mean she's deaf."
The minute she said that was the minute I knew. I felt it in my heart, an absolute. She was deaf.
Her subsequent failure of the newborn hearing screening, and the failure of the next five tries, was confirmation. I remember talking to my mother and being so upset with the nurse, who kept assuring me it was fluid in her ears and once it cleared out, she would pass the test and be fine. I was angry with her for having me come in every few days to test her hearing when I knew she would never pass that test.
My husband was in denial a little longer than me. A mother knows, they say. But a father must discover it for himself.
"Look. She startled at that. She heard you close the door," he would say, or "She heard you clap your hands." She was two weeks old and we were getting ready to see fireworks on the fourth of July. He was standing on the street corner outside our apartment, holding her, when a fire truck passed so close he could have reached out and touched it. The horn blew, and he jumped.
But she didn't. When he walked in the door, he looked at me, and I will never forget the look on his face. It was like a multitude of emotions passed over his normally stoic demeanor in flash. And he said, "I think she's deaf."
There is no history of genetic hearing loss on either side of our families, as far as we know. And when there isn't a clear reason, you don't know where to place the blame.
My mother blamed immunizations, particularly all the ones my husband and I received while we were in the military. Other blamed the fact that I had consumed alcohol before I found out I was pregnant (I found out at four weeks).
I'd been reading through the gospels at the time, and came across John 9:1-4. Jesus is passing by a man who was born blind and His disciples ask him, "Who sinned, the man, his mother or his father, that he should be born blind?" Jesus answered, "Neither him nor his parents sinned, but that the work of God should be revealed in him."
She was born exactly as she should have been. She was born to bring Him glory.
Unlike the story, however, I did not expect miraculous "healing." She was deaf, but I didn't feel like there was anything wrong with her. When she was six weeks old, we took her to church for the first time. The pastor preached a sermon about bad things happening, but God being in control. Toward the end, he began to list the struggles that some of the congregation was going through. People struggling with broken bones, with surgeries, with cancer, with the death of loved ones. And in the middle of the list, and in front of everyone, he points at us.
"Their child was born deaf, but God is in control."
I'm glad God had come to me earlier with His own message before I heard that one. My daughter's lack of hearing was being lumped in with cancer and death. Afterward, people who had never spoken to us before came up to tell me how "sorry" they were. It was eye opening for me, because I'm pretty sure I had done that to my own friends who had kids with special needs, never realizing how that might make them feel. It certainly didn't make me feel good.
Having a deaf child isn't cancer, and it isn't death and it isn't even within the realm of "bad things." In fact, I feel incredibly blessed. A whole world has opened up to me that I probably would never have experienced otherwise. There is a whole subculture I get to be a part of. There is a whole language I have gotten to learn.
She is my firstborn child. My life didn't begin until hers did.
