Isabell's Story
"I knew there was something wrong with Kim as an infant."
I was outside in the driveway one day and I dropped a glass bottle right behind Kimmy. It made a loud bang and she didn't even move. Any other baby would've cried or jumped. I knew then that Kim had a hearing impairment. When she was nine months old, I took her to an ear, nose and throat doctor and had her tested. I didn't know what was wrong, but I was going to all types of doctors based on a mother's instinct. The doctors basically told me that I was overreacting and that there was something more wrong with me than with the child.
I ended up taking Kim to New Orleans where there was a very famous audiologist, and within two hours we knew that she had a moderate to profound loss.
"For the first 48 hours after learning she was deaf I cried."
I was in shock. I was sad. I felt guilty. I felt lost. And I was upset about being upset; she is alive, she walks, she has legs, she doesn't have multiple sclerosis. It was hard enough to raise a child, but to all of a sudden have a handicapped child? When you are a parent to any handicapped child you have guilt. For some strange reason you feel that you caused it because this baby grew inside of you. I knew I had a major road ahead of me and that I was absolutely not capable at that time. I had to make some decisions as to what I was going to do to help her, and I realized that feeling guilty was going to affect her ability to learn.
"This is a hearing world, so I decided to push her to be able to live in it."
Instead of reading a book to your baby, it is a little different. We walked around all day long, feeling the air coming out of our mouths for different sounds, touching throats. I would do it with her, she would do it with me. That was the normality for her to learn how to speak. She learned how to read lips. She was a mainstream child by the time she was eight.
"I wasn't worried about manners. I was worried about speaking!"
Most children when they are little you tell them things like, say thank you, yes ma'am, no ma'am. With Kim, we spent so much time learning to say table, chair, glass, just repetition of words, that I never did teach her to say thank you. I remember someone saying, "Now little girl, you need to say thank you," and I went, "Oh, I forgot manners!"
"When she was teased by other kids, it was like a knife going through me."
She was in the 2nd grade with big pig tails, cute as can be, and she came to me with big dinosaur tears, saying everyone on the playground was teasing her about her hearing aid. I had to hold myself together, and I said, "Kim, is Mom out there on the playground with you?" She said, "No." And I said, "Just talk to them and tell them it is like glasses, just like glasses help you see this thing helps me hear. If you don't explain it, they will just tease you more." Of course when she left the room, I was boo-hooing, wondering why she had to go through this. I realized that you can handicap a handicapped child, so it is important that you allow them to be like all of the other children in the world, to not feel sorry for them because they will feel that, and then they will not have that drive that they need because they have to work ten times harder than anybody else.
"We accomplished what we needed to accomplish."
She came up to me in the 4th grade, and she said, "Mom, sometimes I forget that I am deaf." That moment I will never forget as long as I live. It was a feat that we had worked really hard for. That taught me that you can accomplish anything. It taught me to go after anything in life and not even blink. I take little credit because I was there pushing her. Without her ability, her intellect, her drive, this would not have been accomplished. Kim is just amazing, what she has accomplished in her life.
I have always felt as a mother all these years that if someone could come up with the miracle of fixing it that would be a wonderful thing. I discussed that with Kim and her answer to me was, "I don't know if that would be such a good thing. I love turning off the world when I want to."
