My earliest memories as the hearing daughter of a deaf mother are of me standing in the middle of a circle of women who are telling me to tell my mother how wonderful she is for being a parent of two kids… all I remember is feeling invisible - as if I was just an interpreter…not a 4 year old child who was responsible for my mother’s social interactions. To this day I hate answering the telephone- I had to be my mother’s connection to the world. It wasn’t until I was twelve years old that my mother began to learn sign language. She had been trained in a deaf school that only taught oralism- all of the students in her school had to learn how to read lips, and the nuns would slap their hands with yardsticks if they tried to use them to communicate. I am still angry about this lack of foresight- it kept her shut off from the world for so long. This, in turn, kept me from being able to communicate at the highest level with her at my most formative age…. I am still her parent now - she is 80 years old and now depends on me more to go to medical appointments and deal with the more complicated technologies and interactions of the world now. I do it all with love for her, but have to be careful to not get resentful…I am finally learning boundaries at 55yrs of age.

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