25 Jul Wanted – a warm family home for deaf twin girls aged eight…

There were benefits all around when twin girls who were deaf boarded with Ann Goldberg’s family.

Wanted—a warm family home for deaf twin girls aged eight, from Monday to Friday while attending the local school for deaf children.

Despite living next door to a school for deaf children, we had barely noticed the pupils attending it. They looked like any other young children but with several big differences – the often-bulky hearing aids they sported, the rapid hand movements between them all as they signed to each other, and the unnatural silence as they played games in the yard, broken only by shrieks of joy or annoyance.

I admit to not having given them too much thought until one day when we saw the above notice. The powers that be had decided that these girls were too young to travel to and from their homes every day, but their parents desperately wanted them to be educated there. They couldn’t afford to move nearer to the school – hence the request for weekday accommodation for their daughters.

Our three-bedroom house certainly had room for them. At the time, we only had our one-year-old son, and, as we hoped for a large family, the thought of looking after another two children temporarily didn’t daunt us. I mean, it wasn’t as if there was a question of potty-training or sleepless nights. We slept on it for a while, checked to see if anyone else had come forward, and, realising that we were probably their only chance, we went for it.

Our first meeting with Patricia and Frances and their parents was very uncomfortable. The parents were embarrassingly grateful to us for agreeing to have their daughters, and the girls sat on the couch silently, sullenly clutching their mother. I didn’t blame them. They had never lived away from home before and to be thrust into the home of total strangers whom they couldn’t understand and who couldn’t understand them must have seemed horribly frightening.

The principal of the school offered his complete support and any help or advice. We were asked – no, begged is more like it – not to learn their sign language. The school’s aim was to integrate all their children into the ‘real world’ and the real world was populated with people who didn’t know sign language. The children had to learn to lip-read and talk – no ifs or buts.

Being twins made their lives more pleasant, as they had each other to ‘talk’ to in their own private language. But educationally, it was a big drawback. Because they always had someone who understood them, they made little effort to integrate with the rest of their family and simply settled down into a world of their own. In families with only one deaf child, the child inevitably interacts more with his or her siblings and parents, something Patricia and Frances rarely did.

During the first weeks, the girls were unhappy and homesick. Their mother rang every day, but they, of course, couldn’t hear or talk to her. I would pass on her kisses and hugs.

Don’t imagine that we didn’t come in for criticism from those close to us. “Your son is just learning to talk. You’ll ruin his progress. He’ll start mumbling and grunting just like them,” was one of the finer ways it was put to us. But, in fact, our young toddler was our lifeline and icebreaker. The girls adored him and played with him endlessly. There was no barrier between them, as he hadn’t really started speaking when they arrived, so they had a common non-language. They also knew that they had to force themselves to try to talk clearly so that he could understand them.

When he started to talk, his speech was in no way affected negatively by having Patricia and Frances around. He realised instinctively, without any heavy-handed explanation, that he had to stand directly in front of them if he wanted them to understand him, while at the same time knowing that he didn’t have to do that with either of his parents.

None of us can imagine how exhausting it is to be a non-hearing child in the classroom. To understand a lesson, you have to concentrate and watch the teacher all the time, for every single second. If you turn your head to look out of the window, if you daydream, or if you turn to smile at a friend, you miss a sentence or two. A hearing person can still hear what the teacher is saying while looking for an eraser or doodling in a notebook, but a deaf child has to keep his or her eyes fixed on the teacher.

Because of this, at the end of the school day, the girls were inevitably exhausted and often short-tempered from the strain of trying to keep up with their lessons. We kept our word about not using sign language, but it was often very tempting to cheat a bit. We inevitably picked up a lot by watching them, and it would have made our lives much easier if we had ‘understood’ their signing instead of insisting that they had talked to us. Tempers frayed, frustrations were screamed, and often communication totally broke down, but we knew we had to stand firm for their own good.

The school staff worked miracles, and Patricia and Frances gradually learned to read and speak without ever having heard the sounds themselves. I listened to them reading every evening, and conversations between us got easier as time went by. I learned to speak more slowly, and they learned to talk more clearly.

About a year into their stay, our family expanded, and the girls’ excitement was boundless. They treated our baby daughter as their little sister, and they were marvelous playmates and babysitters, and they were a tremendous help to me.

When they were 10 and therefore old enough to travel to school every day, they returned home. We missed them terribly, but we went to visit them at school, and our families remain friends to this day.

Whatever Patricia and Frances gained by living with us, we gained more from having them with us. We now truly appreciate the gift of hearing – something we all take too much for granted – and we all saw how, with determination and guidance, it is possible to overcome a disability.

Illustrations by Rosalie Street