Sometimes Your Heart Just Breaks

My middle child is a smart, handsome 12-year-old. He's kind and empathic and wants everyone around him to be happy and comfortable. He's polite and accommodating and most of the times selfless in his endeavors. Sometimes I'm not sure if he's real. My middle child is also deaf, and although he has bilateral cochlear implants, he's still deaf and he operates and functions every single day with greater effort than I can probably ever comprehend. He has to try harder to hear what's being said, he has to concentrate harder than anyone around him to keep up in some measure with any conversation, any directive, any social happening. He's usually on the fringes of any activity---hearing enough to not be completely outside the circle but not hearing enough to be in the center of it and to really "get" it.

Most of the time, I think he cruises along okay. That's what I think. But then every now and then there's a night like tonight where, in tears, he admits he wishes he wasn't deaf. Tears because of the impatience of his peers as he struggles to catch all the conversation, the exasperated "what?"s of his unworthy peers as they try to understand the thing that he's saying. His hearing is excellent when you consider that this is a boy who is completely deaf. His speech is excellent when you consider that this is a boy who---without his implants---wouldn't hear a jet landing ten feet from him. He'd feel it and probably know it was coming before you did, but he wouldn't be able to hear it. He wants to be the same as everyone else.

But when you're 12, you don't think about how much harder life would be if you didn't have implants. You don't think about how much luckier you are because you can hear and talk. You don't think about how much greater your life is going to be because you're a kind person and nice and you care about other people and you're not a jerk and self-centered. You don't realize the importance of those things when you're 12. You only know that you're different and the struggle to fit in and be the same is overwhelming some days. You only know that you're not "with it" and not inside the unworthy circle at all times. You don't know that that circle doesn't even matter, because when you're 12, 13, 15, 16, it does matter. And I say "unworthy" because most of them aren't worthy of the selfless, kind boy that he is. So many of them are unkind, punky, mean, impatient, foul-mouthed, snotty kids. Many of them are not, I know, but many of them are---the ones who hurt his heart are. And they're not worthy.

And so your heart breaks. I would become deaf if he could hear. I would lose a limb if it meant he could be hearing---in the full, true sense of the word. But I can only, painfully, stand by and know that he has to grow up deaf in a world that hears and he has to learn how to navigate it for himself. I know he'll do it but the process can be oh, so painful.

And in case that's not enough, his 10-year-old brother is deaf as well. His hearing is excellent, his speech is excellent....but he's deaf and he'll soon be 12 and in middle school and trying to fit in with a bunch of kids who won't have the maturity to be patient or kind.

And my heart will break all over again.