Nov. 2012

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Painful Conversation


Conversations have been painful, extremely painful, for the past 2 weeks at our house. Not the kind of pain that causes one to cry. Painful in its complications. Painful in its slow process.
Prema and Isaac have both reached the developmental stage of playing with others instead of mirror playing. They also are in that "mine" stage, where sharing becomes impossible in their eyes. With Prema home full time again for some of the summer, I feel like crying, ripping the hair out of my head, or just doing it for them by the time the end of the day comes, especially on Friday. This stage is hard enough when you have a normal situation. But instead we have a deaf child who can only sign and doesn't fully understand and/ or fully engage half of he conversation involving her AND a very smart hearing child that understands everything but struggles to sign at the level he speaks/ thinks. So with EVERY conversation held between Prema and Isaac I become referee ("don't hit... sign", don't take that... sign), sign language teacher, external moderator ("pay attention", "look at her/him", "think about what he is saying"), and interpreter of unclear signs. Its painful to watch and be a part of. With each situation I struggle to not just take over and interpret every interchange. At least Isaac is willing to sign again (he used to get frustrated that he couldn't get his fingers/ hands to look exactly like an adult's signs) and Prema is patient enough to physically stand waiting for Isaac to sign.

4 comments:

djp375 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
djp375 said...

Isaac you really look like you are trying to get your point across.

I can only imagine how hard it must be to try and get the two of them to understand one another, get them to share and work together.

At least now Isaac is trying very hard to sign. He is very smart and if he sets his mind to it, he will master all the signing in a very short amount of time.

I hope and pray that it goes better everyday.

Love
Grandma

Carrie said...

Erk. And here I think mediating between Gabe and Israel can be bad enough...

katy said...

Wow, I can only imagine how frustrated you must feel! At least you are able to find some good in the situation and I commend you for doing the more difficult thing of letting them learn to communicate with each other.