Sound After Silence

I haven’t always had problems with my hearing. Though my hearing hasn’t always necessarily been great, the worst of my hearing loss came in the last two years or so. I don’t know, exactly, what brought it on so fast. Before the surgery, I was well on my way to deaf in my left ear (last time I had it tested, I had lost at least 50% of hearing in my left ear – but I suspect that lately it had become far worse) and I am actually, gradually losing my hearing in my right ear as well (so, oh yes, I can look forward to doing this again some day!). My condition is hereditary (my mother started losing her own hearing in her early forties) but generally the loss happens much slower than mine did. There is a theory that being pregnant makes it worse – high amounts of estrogen make the calcification of the bone in the ear happen faster. But of course, I was pregnant eight years ago, not two. So that doesn’t quite fly with me. But whatever. In any case, I was slowly going deaf – and it was frustrating (as anyone who tried to carry on a casual conversation with me will attest to), and sometimes embarrassing (you should hear me try to guess what is being said instead of repeatedly having to ask, “What?” and fail miserably and seem to speak completely randomly and effectively kill any conversation with my weird non-sequiturs) and sometimes even dangerous (yeah, I don’t hear cars coming from behind when I walk on the road. I don’t hear my kids calling out when they are in trouble. I don’t hear much). Obviously, I am happy to have my hearing back. Even if I have to re-learn how to hear. Everything – every little gesture and tick and tack – is resoundingly loud to me right now (even with my packing still in). Putting a glass down on the table, the way my dog pants, the tap of the keyboard, basic conversation, never mind baby cries and squeals – it’s all magnified to an amazing degree. But still, better than not hearing things at all, for certain.

But there was actually a weird sort of comfort in my silence – an easy way to turn away and stop thinking, or rather, stop listening, that I think I might miss a little. It’s a selfish thing – and I have friends who have hard of hearing spouses who complain about this tendency – this way that we who cannot hear clearly can just turn our heads if we don’t like the conversation, turn inward, fall into our own little wave of silence. I could turn over on my right side each night, cover the ear that (relatively) works, and black everything out. I didn’t always like it – it especially bothered my mother self, not being able to hear the breath of the child who was sleeping just next to me, but there was some sort of voluptuous pleasure in it, too. An erasure. A falling inward, down my own well, that I have grown used to. And the more hearing I lost, the more I could feed my natural drift toward solitude and hermit like behavior. I didn’t have to go to parties if I didn’t feel like it, because I knew it would just be an exercise in frustration for me by the time the night was over. I didn’t have to work very hard at keeping up the conversation in social settings (something that I have always been good at doing) because I was bound to slip up at some point, anyway. It allowed me to completely zero in to the words on the page (or screen) – which is a natural inclination of mine, anyway. I have always used reading or writing as a means of escape, but how easy it is to block everything but the page out when your head is basically full of white noise – the swish of your own heart and the sound of your own breath. And, I am somewhat ashamed to say, when my son would be persistently whining about something – or trying to argue his way toward something I refused to give him, I could easily end the conversation without actually having to end the conversation, merely by turning my head. It was a weird little trick. One that I was starting to use too often, I suspect. One that would have undoubtedly damaged my relationships with lots of people because it made it so very easy to throw up a wall whenever I wanted to. But one that sometimes lifted the pressure of being responsible to so many people, too.

I don’t know how I was compensating for my lack of hearing. I haven’t learned to read lips. I don’t think my vision (which has always been incredibly bad as well) or my sense of smell suddenly sharpened. Mainly, I leaned in, leaned down, explained my situation and asked people to speak up. And I missed a lot. I have liked learning sign language (something that I do for my daughter, but used in other ways as well) – it felt somewhat preparatory for me – but that wasn’t going to help me outside of my own little family (who all know that they have to practically yell for me to hear them, anyway) and it wasn’t an answer to what I was missing.

It’s good to have sound back. Even the more annoying sounds like cars passing by, or the high hum of electronics. I have willingly allowed myself to be pulled back into the world – to start monitoring more than one thing at a time, to not miss anything anymore. But I think I might feel a small loss in my inability to disconnect now. I think I might be a little wary of being made whole again.