Sandy sat with her coffee reading the morning paper. She loved this time of the morning. The house was quiet, the dog was still sleeping and she knew she had but minutes before the whole house was in chaos. The kids would need breakfast, the dog would need feeding, she already packed the kids backpacks as she was going to take Michael for his swimming lessons.
“Whew!” she thought, mornings were indeed chaotic. Sandy savoured the few minutes she had before waking her two boys, five and one.
“OK,” she sighed and slugged down some of her coffee and made her way upstairs. “Michael, time to get up sunshine,” she said. She went into the baby’s room. “Hi sweet pea,” she said as she picked up the cooing baby Kyle. She laid down the baby to change his diaper. She could hear Michael stirring in the adjacent room. She grabbed the baby and went back to Michael’s room. Not again, she thought to herself. Her Michael was acting so strange the past few months.
They had only moved into the new neighbourhood a few months before. Her husband worked long tedious hours at a manufacturing plant and she stayed home with her two boys. She did some data entry for her dad’s family business from home when the kids were sleeping.
It was summer and Michael was at home for the summer. In September he was going into year one. He was starting full days and Sandy was going to miss him. Michael went to a special school as he was deaf. Sandy and her husband Ben, thought it would be best if he attended the deaf school for a few years and then they would move him to a hearing school with interpreters. He was thriving as he played with many other deaf children. However, like most places, there were cliques. Michael was in a family of hearing parents which wasn’t as ‘good’ as being in a family where everyone was deaf. The school board committees tried to persuade Sandy and Ben to have Michael live at school and he could come home on the weekends and school holidays. They told them he would develop better social skills and it was better for deaf children to be raised in the proper environment, not with hearing parents who really didn’t understand deaf culture.
Michael’s behaviour started to change. Sandy wondered if it was because he was missing his deaf friends. Sandy learned some sign language when she was a young girl as she lived across the road from two deaf families. When she heard her son was deaf, Sandy started signing right away. Her little Kyle was already signing a few words when he played with his big brother.
They were renting this ten-year-old townhouse until they could move into their new house in a couple of months. They bought it before they dug ground. Sandy was excited at the opportunity to move to her first house. They’d lived in apartments and now this townhouse for about nine months. Luckily they didn’t need to sign a lease. The older lady really liked Ben as he was a friend of her husbands.
Sometimes Sandy would notice her baby startle then watch his eyes appear to follow something. She tried to convince herself it was a fly or a bug. They didn’t have pets, but they considered getting a cat in the near future. Michael was acting oddly, he would stop, smile, laugh, and sign to himself and skip to his bedroom.
“Who are you talking to?” Sandy would sign to Michael.
He would sign that he was talking to this person or that person and sometimes he would say he was talking to his Great Grandma. He always signed the name Grandma M. Grandma was Sandy’s Grandma whom she was very close to.
Deaf people always made signs for people’s names to identify who they were talking about. They typically made the names based on something about their personality. Maybe the lady had long hair and their first name started with an ‘L’ then they may sign the letter L while flowing down their hair to represent the long haired lady whose name starts with L. It was that simple, but that’s what deaf people do.
Ghostly Writes Anthology 2016 Page 40
