You might be familiar with the term CODA from the 2021 film of the same name. The film explores a deaf fishing family who, due to government regulations, must rely on their hearing teenage daughter to maintain their business. It is from the perspective of Ruby, a CODA (Child of Deaf Adult) child who navigates the responsibility of being her family’s connection to the hearing world, while also questioning her own individual adult aspirations outside the family. To date, it is the only media I have ever seen of CODA representation.
Growing up with deaf parents is a huge defining feature of who I am. I didn’t know there was a term (CODA) for what I was until I was around 25. That there were others like me. A term that describes hearing children who grow up on the cusp of hearing culture and deaf culture. Deaf people further define these cultures as a ‘hearing world’ and a ‘deaf world’, two conflicting worlds I lived in at the same time. I am aware that this is not a unique feature to just CODAs, that many children grow up in different cultures at home that can be polarising to the one they live at school or in the wider world. I see it often as a teacher with parent-teacher interviews with children who speak better English or the only English in their households. Either they, or sometimes an older sibling, will translate our meetings. I, knowing all too well the kind of information that may or may not make it to their parents despite the fact that I’m saying it directly to them.
CODAs (or any other intercultural child) are handed a tremendous amount of responsibility (and sometimes burden) from an incredibly early age. I would argue that this is not the fault of deaf parents, but an ableist society. I am not exaggerating when I say that I was translating for my parents by the time I was five. I cannot imagine the frustration and humiliation they must have felt of having their small child convey the world to them. People who existed independently and were functioning successfully before I was born. To see, quite plainly, that people would rather communicate with me, a small child, instead of taking the time to see what they, adults, would want to write out on their own behalf. This clear witness to prejudice made me grow up quickly. The language I used, and the way I presented myself mattered, I understood it was how my whole family, and in many ways, unfairly, how all deaf people may be judged.
I saw repeatedly the prejudice of people towards my parents. The belittling of their intelligence. The underlying assumption that they were unable. Their continuous exclusion of most facets of society, unintentionally or not. They knew and felt it, they saw it. But CODAs hear it, we are trained to. The amount of discrimination I protected, or attempted to protect from my parents would be impossible to explain- it is endless. Whatever my parents didn’t capture through facial expressions and body language, I wiped the audio clean. If it wasn’t ignorance, it was pity. If it wasn’t bigotry, it was impatience. If it wasn’t mockery, it was dismissiveness. The list is exhaustive. Sometimes, in a seemingly better case scenario, people were merely curious about us, which meant we were constantly stared at in any realm of public life, whether we want to be or not, we are always on display to others.
At best, a CODA could be considered a lifelong editor, bringing the best aspects of either side to each other. At worst, a CODA could be considered, a liar, an interferer, someone who does not present whole truths. But they do so to protect the dignity of their parents, or themselves. We attempt to control a narrative that is already not in our loved ones’ favour. It is only in my adult years upon reflection, with only my mother still alive, that I realise, that while I try and protect my mother, I, also, contribute to the unintentional infantilization of her.
My mother is an incredibly capable and resilient woman. It has been over 20 years since I’ve lived at home with her. When we visit with each other, I am once again confronted with how difficult it is for my mother to interact with the hearing world. I develop maternal instincts about my own mother. As an example, her recent trip to the UK. International travel can be tricky at the best of times. Things can quickly change en route, with an air of continuous unpredictability. Often these last minute changes are expressed verbally, over sound systems in airports, by the time it reaches a screen for someone to read, it is too late to make the necessary moves to necessary gates, particularly in enormous, international airports. The last time my mother was flying back to Canada, my sister suggested she go with the special assistance offered by the airport to help her on her journey back to Canada, as she had to change flights at Toronto. I agreed. My mother was initially wary of this, but she was also worried about missing her connection flight.
Despite having no physical difficulties she was sat down in a wheelchair and wheeled over, we watched nearby as they shouted instructions at her, despite my sister on several occasions explaining she was deaf and my mother’s persistent pointing to her ear and mouthing the words that she was deaf, pulling out a paper and pen. This was ignored. My mother was furious. This past Christmas we carefully asked the same question to her upon her return to Canada. She pondered the question heavily, but I could see the moment four years ago replaying vividly across her face. She was upset about the wheelchair, and being shouted at. Her needs blatantly misunderstood. She declined assistance, understandably. However, after my sister and I sent her through security, we walked away, worried, feeling simultaneously proud of her and guilty for what might happen.
My mother feels about deaf culture the same as many other marginalised groups feel about their own. She is concerned and actively fights against the assimilation and elimination of her culture. My mother does not wear a hearing aid, she has not had surgery to get a cochlear implant, she does not want to hear. She does not see hearing as better, despite being made to feel otherwise her whole life. My father’s parents were both deaf, his relatives were deaf. He also attended deaf school. He had a full community of deaf people. My mother was the only deaf person in her family. None of my mother’s family communicate with her using sign language.
She and many other deaf children were sent to residential schools, away from their families and communities from the age of five to seventeen. They joined other deaf and also blind children from all over the Atlantic provinces. She was not provided an adequate education, one that greatly disadvantaged her for her entire life. Many of the staff at the school could not speak sign language. Deaf and blind children were often mixed and unable to communicate with one another. There were allegations of abuse many students kept secret until recently. Who could they have told? Who would listen? Her whole childhood was conflicted: was it better to be in the comfort of her own family even though there was no one to talk to, or was it better to be at school where she had other deaf children like her to talk to even though it further alienated her from her family? An unthinkable choice. My mother, along with so many other deaf children deserve better.
I wish I could say that things have improved since that time, but depending on what part of the world you’re from, I’m not sure I could say that. 15 years ago, I was an interpreter for a little boy (who is now an adult) who is deaf, who had just moved from Pakistan. He was not allowed to go to school there. He had never formally learned any language until he was seven years old, when his family had moved to Canada, relieved that he could now finally be included in education. I don’t need to explain to you the disadvantages one has if language is delayed for this period of time. He had surgery, a cochlear implant was put in, and that first year was really only about him trusting his hearing. He clearly didn’t. He had no reason to. Hearing was uncomfortable for him. He had learned to understand the world in other ways. He was a child who was unable to formally speak to others, sign language or spoken English. Some of the very patient children didn’t need language to be his friend. He made some but small progress. I left to become a teacher and once when I came back to substitute, he ran up to me, he told me he was moving away to Alberta where he was going to a deaf school. With flashes of his hands, he chatted away, explaining his world to me using sign language. Going from no language to full sentences. He had so much to say. This child I sat in almost silence with for all those months, with only occasional words, was now finally able to show me the more more finite inner workings of his mind. I wept, in him I saw my mother.
Simultaneously, at that time, I worked for the Boys and Girls Club where a Canada World Youth Delegation was volunteering for a few months. One of these participants was a young deaf adult. Never, in my entire life had I met a deaf person, especially such a young person, that was so well adjusted with the hearing world, especially a deaf person who didn’t wear a hearing aid or cochlear implant and had no interest in doing so. He was born to hearing parents, who had decided to send him to deaf specialist preschools and elementary schools so he could have a strong basis of ASL and deaf culture. He was then integrated into highschool with an interpreter as his parents wanted to adequately prepare him for full integration as an adult. Speaking fluent sign language to him, I was struck at how apparent his strong foundation in his own language and culture was, and that when it came time for him to integrate, he could, easily knowing confidently who he was. He had developed strategies to communicate with hearing people without sacrificing his deafness. If only my mother could have had this existence.
When I was born the first question my mother’s mother asked her about me was if I was deaf. To my mother, this was the most offensive question that could be asked. The public health nurse that worked closely with my mother when I was born was also worried that I was deaf as I was making little to no verbal progression in speech. My mother once again was furious. She knew I was hearing. She could see by the way I reacted to sounds. She argued that I was communicating, heavily, through sign language, which she and my father taught me extensively. I was speaking the amount any child would- just not in the language that was preferred by others. My mother felt judged for not making me hearing enough, even though in that first year at home, she had far surpassed the communication capability she had learned at her childhood home throughout her in her entire life. Had she not done better? Why was she made to feel it was not good enough?
There was a moment in the film CODA where the deaf mother (Marlee Matlin) and her hearing daughter Ruby (Emilia Jones) are discussing Ruby’s hearingness in her deaf family, asking if her parents wished she was deaf like them and her brother so she wouldn’t be the odd one out. It is not a question I’ve heard said aloud by anyone ever, but one I grew up wondering. Would life have been better between my mother and I if we were the same? So much of my early life was immersed so heavily in a ‘hearing world’. I loved singing, I loved acting, I loved playing music. Activities that gave my life meaning, inherently excluded my parents. Another scene from CODA, where Ruby, a talented singer, is onstage performing her heart out to a full auditorium of engaged listeners. The filmmaker uses an incredibly effective perspective shot of her family with the sound removed, watching the scene onstage. The family has no idea why it’s good or special, or if it is at all. This confirmed my worst fear. That the things I loved most appeared silly or irrelevant to the people I loved most. The amount of times my parents sat through something they could not participate in, just so they could support me- is hard for me not to still feel guilty about.The nothingness and boringness of those many performances. There simply because they loved me. It is those exacting moments of CODA, that sting me, its aptness in capturing moments I had forgotten. I am reminded of the loneliness of my experience. Unable to communicate this to anyone other than my sister, for they could not understand.
My sister and I decided to show my mother the film CODA, to see if the emotional impact on her was the same for us. If the same moments that made us well up, were the same for her. If she could somehow understand the loneliness and difficulty we experienced in addition to her own. She understood immediately the burdensome decision Ruby felt in wanting to go away to school to pursue music or staying behind to ensure her family’s business was still able to run as they needed a hearing person. However, none of the other emotional aspects of the film that affected my sister and I, affected her.
The part that affected her most, was the deepest example of injustice towards deaf people in the film. There is a moment where Ruby does not attend work on the fishing boat with her family, which (unknowingly to her) results in them being heavily fined and suspended for not following safety measures of having a hearing person onboard, due to a surprise inspection. My mother was livid as she watched this scene. Not at Ruby, but at the inspector on board. The inspector secretly reports Frank (Ruby’s deaf father) and Leo (Ruby’s deaf brother), without their knowledge. That she did not have the courtesy to write to them to let them know she had reported them, that she let them continue working, unaware of their fate. In a humiliating example of unjust dramatic irony, the coast guard arrived, sirens blaring, the two deaf men, their backs turned, still working, completely unaware they were in trouble. To the coast guards the deaf men’s ignorance of their presence seems either defiant, or dumb- to which the two men are neither. With a heads up, they would have been ready to face the coast guard, literally face on with some dignity. My mother was further incensed, why did their deafness prohibit them from fishing? They were clearly fishing successfully. To her, and obviously them, it felt needlessly prohibitive. Needlessly discriminatory. Could there not be a flashing light onboard to warn them of a new message/communication? Could they not type back a response? Surely technology now would have a workable solution? I wish I had better answers for her.
Like those moments at the airport, like those men on the boat, it is difficult to see how normal, everyday tasks that you or I do with ease, are a potential risk to deaf people. As my mother gets older, I see the added complications of her age and the further discrimination this entails. In those rare and fortunate moments I am with her, I realise too heavily now how vulnerable she is. Although she is my mother, it is in those moments, I realise too, that in a way, I am also her mother. How close to danger she is at every turn. That at one moment in our visit, she didn’t turn her head quite enough before crossing the road, a car barrelled around the corner speeding towards her. Completely unaware, she walked confidently across the road, my sister sprinting behind her to scoop her towards the otherside. This is just one example of danger in the moments we were together. While my sister and I are aware of the dangers and are afraid, we cannot constantly think about it. It would paralyse us. Equally, isn’t there danger for all of us? Perhaps my mother sees a different kind of danger when she as a mother observes us, her children? That loving anyone always means having to worry?
Just as my mother is proud of being deaf, I am proud of her deafness. Of her determination, her resilience and her creativity. Of her insistence on being herself in a world that wants her to be otherwise. Although there are many things I would change about this world, I would change nothing about my mother’s deafness. I am proud to be her child: I am proud to be a CODA.
Oh Lill, I teared up as I read your beautiful and insightful words. I am so proud of Jeannie too! She is not only strong and resilient but I am in awe of her and how with such hardship she has been able to stay so kind and loving as well! This is so rare. I am also very proud of you and Jen! Nobody can ever take away the closeness that the three of you have. There has not been enough progress in the prejudice shown against the deaf community!!! I thought that CODA was one of the best movies I had ever seen and I can understand why it touched the three of you deeply. Interesting that you reacted differently to different parts of the movie but when I thought about it that made sense. Jeannie as a hard working and intelligent woman has had the experience throughout her life of being underestimated. Your writings are so captivating and I think you should look at trying to get published…seriously! Love you!
Thank you Noelle. xx