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Deaf parents showed love

A Springfield woman organizes activities at Covenant Presbyterian Church.

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer 10:37 PM Saturday, April 24, 2010

SPRINGFIELD — As a little girl, Marianna Stewart remembers sitting on the curb outside the Deaf Club in Brooklyn, N.Y., thinking “these people are the greatest people — the best people in the world.”

As a hearing child of deaf parents, “I knew there were differences,” Stewart said. And one was most obvious.

Whether it’s because smiles, frowns and intense body language are so much part of what she calls “the grammar” of signing, she’s not sure.

“But the love,” Stewart said, pausing briefly. “What a difference with deaf people. The love is there.”

Stewart last year got a chance to return some of that love to her deaf mother, Edwina Olsen, by helping to organize Springfield’s first Mother Father Deaf Day at Covenant Presbyterian Church, where Stewart’s husband, Raymond, is a pastor.

“She loved the service, and we had many deaf friends come,” Mrs. Stewart said. Her mother has since died of ovarian cancer. But the event founded by Children of Deaf Adults International and supported locally by the Springfield Foundation continues with services at 10:30 a.m. and a program at noon today at the church.

Remembering

“Now the tide has turned. Now deaf people are very proud and consider it a gift to have deafness,” said Mrs. Stewart. “But at that time, going back, you didn’t want to be deaf.”

Although most deaf children today grow up learning American Sign Language, her parents both went to schools for the deaf that did not allow signing. They instead encouraged lip-reading and other techniques for learning the spoken English of the hearing world.

“Their first language was really English, and they read lips well,” Stewart said. Only later did they study ASL.

Her parents John and Edwina Olsen had to communicate with both a deaf son and a daughter with hearing.

“They would sign to him and then talk to me,” Stewart said. “So I learned to understand more than I could actually use. But I was embarrassed that I couldn’t sign fluently. So after I left home, I took lessons.”

Deafness added other aspects to home life that still makes Stewart smile.

One was the face-to-face communication, meaning hugs accompanied exchanges of good morning and good night.

Another was how her mother ended arguments.

“If she was mad and didn’t want to hear what you wanted to say, she’d close her eyes.”

Finally, because her parents sat her in front of the television news so she’d be exposed to spoken English, Stewart said she grew up speaking in a Midwest accent, not with the accent of the Brooklyn where she was raised.

Till the cows  come home

Her parents’ deafness also affected relationships outside the family.

“On a Saturday night every month, (her parents and their deaf friends) would take turns going to each other’s houses.”

Unable to communicate easily during the work week, “they would stay out until 4 in the morning” to catch up with one another’s lives. Stewart said.

“We’d hang out in our pajamas and talk and eat,” often watching captioned films her deaf uncle helped to caption as part of his work.

Then a teletype machine came into their home.

“It was our first phone communication,” Stewart said. And because of the noise it made, “I could always tell my mother was on the phone.”

The teletype came in part because her father was a printer — another thing that was part of the earlier era.

“It’s what deaf boys were trained to do,” Stewart said.

In much the same way, the family ended up traveling to the same South Florida spot where other deaf people vacationed.

Individuals, still

Stewart is still amazed at how sociable her parents were, her mother’s unusual skill with written language demonstrated in crossword puzzle skills, and the level of misunderstanding the deaf often confront.

Stewart remembers being asked “Oh, your father’s deaf, can he read Braille?”

Now a student in the interpreting program at Sinclair Community College, Stewart is struck at how technology is changing life for deaf people and how attitudes in the deaf community embrace deafness in a new way.

An example is the disapproval by some of the term “hearing impaired.” The objection is that the label carries the implication that it’s the people, not their hearing, that are impaired.

Stewart’s view: “You have to accept the gifts you receive.”

Just as “I wouldn’t be who I am” without having grown up in a deaf family, she said, “my parents had this gift of being who they were” in part because and in part independent of their deafness.

And so on this Mother Father Deaf Day, she hopes to remember her parents in the way many others will remember their own parents on Mother’s and Father’s days: as the loving people they were.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.

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