Thinking about My Being Deaf

Thinking about things is a journey that has no timetables. I stop at will to ponder the broad and strange horizon. I'm but a thinker who happens to be Deaf.

I couldn't understand my being Deaf without understanding where I came from. Deaf parents. The Netherlands. And the United States.

My parents met at Effatha, a school for the Deaf in Voorburg, The Netherlands. They got married after their "school af," a Dutch phrase for the completion of schooling. A few years later my sister Meriam and I enrolled in their school, and we were told about many stories about our parents, aunt and uncle who also went there. Our father loves to read, and our mother is very dotting to make sure we understood many things about the world. One day they told us to make an announcement at school that we were to move to the United States.

I experienced something strange when I first told my school teacher that we were moving out of The Netherlands. Let me help you imagine that experience. For months at Effatha, I was taught to rely on hearing people for information, knowledge and communication. I was told that they knew before we the Deaf did. They had first-hand information and knowledge, and we the Deaf must follow them.

When my parents told my sister and me to announce to our school that we were going to America, I began to sense something powerful. We had first-hand information; our school didn't know about our parents' decision to live in the United States. Yes, they got very upset and told me that the English language is hard to learn.

The Netherlands is a small country. It is the monarchy democracy. Democracy with the royal figurehead. The Dutch republic materialized after winning the war against Spain in 1572. Free thinking began to flourish and, by language and culture, Dutch people are fiercely independent and probaly stubborn. We pride in saying that the Almight created the universe but we made Holland.

Coming to live in the United States was a big, huge, enormous steppingstone in my life. I underwent language change and culture shock. ASL is easy to master but the English language is so oppressive it keeps changing. Language acquisition and planning has been my forte for so many years I'm going to celebrate my 30th year of teaching by this summer (7 years in Deaf Education and 23 years in colleges and universities).

Thinking makes me deliver some unpopular messages, often at my own peril. I learned from Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" that the more I deliver my thoughts, the less I'm in contact with the standard of "holiness." Socrates questions Euthyphro: "They have differences of opinion, as you say, about good and evil, just and unjust, honorable and dishonorable. There would have been no quarrels among them, if there had been no such differences--would there?"

I think, and therefore I differ in my thoughts. ASL is different from Gebarentaal (the language and culture of my birth); the Dutch language is different from English (the language I continue to master); Gebarentaal from Dutch; ASL from English. In my college years, I got straight A's in French. Je t'aime!