Two Implants, Two Owls

Anna's activation was two weeks ago. I'm not sure what to write about it, so I haven't been writing. When I rewatch the video, I realize that activation videos don't feel the same when you watch them as they did when you were in the room during the introduction of sound. In the room, you are nervous that they might not work. You are nervous that maybe the grandparents have come all this way to see nothing. You are nervous that your child will not like this thing upon which all your months of hoping have hinged.

Then, when Anna did hear, and when she did just what we wanted her to do (a quick lift of the head in recognition and a reaching for me), we were so surprised, we didn't even say the right things to her. The week prior, Michael had asked me what I was going to say to Anna. "Probably her name," I had said. AN-NA. A perfect name for a child learning to hear, with intonation that rises and falls symmetrically and letters she will be able to say early. But I didn't say her name. I thought I would cry, but I didn't. As prepared as we were for the emotions and surprises of the morning, I was still overwhelmed. The room felt a-tingle with anxiety. It was snowy outside. I wished I had washed my hair. Anna hadn't napped. I couldn't quite see her face where I was sitting. Maybe I didn't cry because I wasn't really ready.

When we got home that day, the gathering of sleet was weighing down the cherry blossoms in the backyard and there was a canopy of white petals and snow over our back windows. Anna didn't want to keep the implants on. The world was supposed to be changed and it seemed like a winter that went on unchanging, without end. I wanted to swim, to shed everything weighty underwater, but I couldn't. I didn't want to leave Anna. I held her in my hands and wondered if I would see anything that showed me she was still hearing. She pulled the implants out with both hands and threw them on the floor.

But now! Now we are two weeks out and each day, with a skinny remote I carry in my purse, we have upped the amplitude so her implants meets her brain's prescription (we know this from the ABR test that shows the minimum and maximums she needs to make out every tone beginning with the middle C). Now, we see her changes and hear her changes, and I am so ready. It's like we flipped an ON switch that was connected to so many other things. Even though she's still toothless, Anna is eating pea-sized bites of salmon and burger, blueberries I bite into quarters, whole jars of winter squash. She is making raspberries with her lips when I say the car goes brrrppp beep-beep. She is waving to us when we wave to her, her hand tentatively--thoughtfully--opening and closing "like a small starfish," my brother David says. She claps when I clap. She breaks into a grin when Zaley plays the Doodlebug song. She is laughing more than ever and she sounds like a Tickle-Me-Elmo. This all happened last week. It could be that she's 10 months old. Or it could be that hearing has changed her understanding of what's around her, what's within her, what's possible to receive, what's possible to give.

I realized this week that for much of Anna's development, I have been doing subconscious subtraction and addition: yes, she's 10 months old, but she's more like 6 months because of congenital cmv. Or, she's 10 months old, but she might not have teeth till she's 13 months old because, as my mom's friend Rosi so nicely put it, "Her brain is busy with other things." When we first found out that cmv causes "gross motor delays," I shrunk in the shadow of that dark, impaired phrase. There was one doctor's appointment when the receptionist handed me the milestone questionnaire with a white board marker--the questionnaire where there are three columns of bubbles, and they are: Always, Sometimes, Not Yet. While Anna sat quietly in my lap, I filled in just about every Not Yet. Our kind pediatrician, upon taking my clipboard and seeing that the marker had been partially removed by falling tears, said I don't ever have to do those again when we come in.

But now that so much of Anna seems to be revealing itself to us, I realize that because so much of her development is late onset, I can see with much more clarity the spreading out of her stability. Because I know Anna is fighting something inside her every day, I am super proud of everything I witness; milestones are miles marked with big gleaming boulders instead of signs passed at fast speeds that go unnoticed while watching a neurotypical child discover and grow. In the movie The Dropbox, an amazing man in South Korea who adopts orphans left in a mailbox outside his door says of kids with special needs that though much of the world looks upon them as an affliction to their parents, their purpose in the world is to teach us something about ourselves.

Anna is teaching me what it means to value movement, to value something as routine and automatic as the act of eating, to value the hard work of true listening. The other night, she woke at 3 AM and cooed in her crib till I took her out to nurse her. While she was dozing at my chest, two owls began to call to each other just outside the window. I know there were two of them because one owl's higher pitched response would interrupt the first owl again and again. The second one, the quieter one, seemed to have something urgent to say. I wondered if Anna could hear it, then I remembered, she didn't have her implants in, and that she is deaf. I wanted to tell her about their sound. One day I will.