As the Canada and Switzerland match gets underway in the background, the Cow (a.k.a. my father unit) is trying to finish his post-Father’s Day-feast-pontificating at the table in the open living/dining room area, popular to many of the homes built after the Second World War.
The brother unit, who is without cable at his home in Guelph, is straining to hear the commentators of the FIFA 2015 Women’s World Cup soccer match over our conversation, and continues to raise the volume on the TV until I abruptly turn and snap at him, “Please lower the TV, we can’t even hear ourselves think!” For years, I’ve watched as the Cow has become increasingly frustrated with television programming ignoring the challenges of the hearing-impaired by making background noises, and particularly advertisements, increasingly louder, while making valuable content (conversation, commentary, reporting, etc.) increasingly quieter. Of the three of us, my hearing is probably the least impaired – not having been exposed to years, decades even, of loud machine shop and assembly line noises – so being in between competing sounds is too much for my brain to handle.
It reminds me of a less-than-stellar father-daughter moment, when I inadvertently (as an upset adolescent) did invoke my able-bodied privilege against the Cow – borrowing from #8 on MIT’s School of Architecture & Planning’s take on Peggy McIntosh’s article on white privilege-
- I can be assured that assumptions about my mental capabilities will not be made based on my physical status.
In the summer of my 8th year, as I performed one of my harrowing feats of strength, and imagination, as a child before the introduction of cellphones, tablets, and computer games, I injured my kidney in a bad fall. My parents fought before taking me to the hospital, and I guess I never really forgave my father for not caring enough (my 8 year-old me, thought) to force the issue to a fight – a point I drove home later, during my month-long hospital stay, when I uttered the words most hated by him, if not most people, “What are you, stupid?” Most hated, as I didn’t realize at the time, having more to do with his being a relatively new Canadian, immigrating from Italia a couple of decades prior – not speaking a word of English.
We were watching the Family Feud, with debonair English-American actor and comedian, Richard Dawson hosting. He made one of his darkly humourous, full of innuendo, jokes and I laughed. The Cow asked me to repeat what was said, likely finding the sound on the tiny hospital TV, coupled with the accent, difficult to pick-up enough of the context to understand the joke. For the hearing-impaired, accents can be quite an issue, as well as pitch of a particular individual, where the impairment is specific to a particular range – in this case, both the higher, and lower ranges, are significantly gone. My 8-year-old self, still a bit frightened and upset by the goings on leading to the hospital, and in the hospital, couldn’t sympathize with the Cow, and after the third request to repeat the joke, interpreted it as an inability to understand the joke, and fired off those infamous 4 words.
He didn’t speak to me for a week – my third in hospital. It took him a long time to forgive me, and eventually forget. Thankfully, I’ve never forgotten and can appreciate how fortunate I am to have all my senses working relatively well, and even more fortunate to appreciate what it is like to for someone with a hearing-impairment to participate in a conversation in a noisy setting.
(*Excerpt from an offline journal on Father’s Day – June 21, 2015)