I\u2019ve spent a lot of this evening running up and down the stairs. My husband is out working late and both my girls have got a cough and cold. The light monitor keeps going off, as one girl coughs a little or perhaps makes a sniffle in their sleep, it makes the light go and of course I have to investigate each flash in case its a genuine one. I miss my husband on nights like these, he normally tells me if it was just a cough so I don\u2019t need to bother going upstairs or if indeed there is a cry and one of them is awake. At least I\u2019m getting some exercise!<\/p>\n
Having a hearing husband is great, I rely on him hugely to make phone calls for me, listen out for the girls, tell me what adverts said on the television if it wasn\u2019t subtitled, order food at restaurants if the waiter is hard to understand and generally be my ears. I never set out for a hearing partner though, it just happened that the man I wanted to marry turned out to be so. If I had ended up marrying a deaf man, I\u2019d have been just as happy, we\u2019d just have done things slightly differently I\u2019m sure. There are many times, like this evening where I have to do things differently, and adapt to my needs and there are plenty of times when I am on my own and have to deal with the situation there and then regardless of how, so I know I\u2019d not have batted an eyelid, should my life partner have had no hearing either.<\/p>\n
The point is, I do get the \u201cNo Man\u2019s Land\u201d feeling quite frequently still. I am very much part of the Deaf world, but also very much part of the Hearing world. Sometimes I don\u2019t feel I belong wholly in either. I have many Deaf friends, I can use sign language, I need help to hear, have flashing lights etc but my family are also all hearing, my colleagues are all hearing, I can speak well and have always adapted the best I can. Many people have told me, upon meeting that they didn\u2019t realise I was Deaf to start with.<\/p>\n
Being in No Man\u2019s Land, comes from living and working in a hearing world predominantly but still having the needs of a Deaf person. As I am so used to the hearing world, I yearn to be more accepted by it. But I still struggle so much in situations where I simply cannot hear or follow what is going on. Equally, I yearn to be more accepted by the Deaf world, I certainly feel more at home in the Deaf community to be quite honest, signing comes naturally to me, I can be understood and I can understand but I feel out of touch. It seems to be one without the other when it comes to my life v hearing\/deaf world. I went to a wedding earlier on in the year where the bride and groom were both deaf and probably 99% of the guests were too. I went along with a mutual friend and it was like everyone knew each other. I was certainly surprised at how many people I did know there from different realms of my life; it\u2019s amazing how wide yet close knit we are! But, I still had that yearning feeling, to be more involved, know more people, go to more Deaf events and as my life is focussed around the hearing world mostly, it\u2019s hard to keep up to date.<\/p>\n
I may come back to this post and re-edit. Its hard to explain exactly where I\u2019m coming from and I\u2019m not sure that I have done so. I do want to clarify though that often, it is actually brilliant to be part of both worlds. I feel that the Deaf community offer me so much, but at the end of the day I\u2019m involved naturally, in the hearing community a whole lot more so it\u2019s a bit like my body spans No Man\u2019s land, but I have a few fingers in each.<\/p>\n
I have two big appointments on Thursday by the way. I will let you know how they go x<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve spent a lot of this evening running up and down the stairs. My husband is out working late and both my girls have got a cough and cold. The light monitor keeps going off, as one girl coughs a little or perhaps makes a sniffle in their sleep, it makes the light go and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thedeafone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thedeafone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thedeafone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thedeafone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thedeafone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thedeafone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thedeafone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thedeafone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thedeafone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}