We are entering this day with mixed emotions. We have tried to figure out how we would feel today at various points along the way, but we were never able to really come up with anything until this week. And what we came up with is so different than anything we ever thought we would feel...a sense of great gain with an unrelenting sense of loss. The celebratory nature of today needs no explaining, it is the mournful moments that we have had to figure out for ourselves and strive to explain to others. Today, we mourn the fact that Amichai will never really know his perfection from birth, his God-given right to silence. We can't even say when this all became so important to us, but it crept in and now it is central to our family identity. Don't misunderstand-we do not doubt our choice to give Amichai implants...access to sound in this world will provide him with expanded avenues to romp and roam, heightened potential and greater resources. We know it is the right choice at this juncture. But deafness has a holiness that we, in part, will take from him today. He will, God-willing, continue to feel a sense of identity in his deafness, and we hope that he will find peace each day in his minutes without his implants on, in his holy world of silence. But even if someday, he chooses to take his implants off forever, he will always know this world with sound...today we strip him of that other whole perspective. We cannot ignore that is this is one of those life moments where the right choice holds such a profound layer of sadness in it, and today we are grappling with that.
Alongside growing into our role as parents, we have grown another identity in our journey with Amichai; it's a space in this world that we have found rich and connecting with others, and unique and deep in our building connection with our son. We are the parents of a deaf child. Until now, we have had to constantly remain aware and thoughtful of ways other than auditory transmission to communicate with Amichai. He is a natural communicator, and our connection with him is so special, partly because we interact in ways that are shaped by his deafness. We mourn the idea of losing any of our creativity to communicate with him, or worse, his creativity in communication with us and the world around him.
We are profoundly grateful for this technology. We are blessed to have the means and willpower to give our son this gift. And with it, comes some heavy-heartedness. But that, we are sure, is also just a part of the weight of being parents. We hope that Amichai will revel in the uniqueness of his ability to weave in and out of the hearing world. We hope that we will be forever changed in our perspective on communication by these first eight months, and will continue to give him unique perspective on the world that we wouldn't have had if our son wasn't deaf. We hope that Amichai will feel fulfilled in his ability to make choices for himself regarding language and communication, and that us having provided him with myriad resources to interact with the world will give him a redefined yet self-assured sense of unique perfection, created by us in the image of God, for all of his life.
So, today has come...ready or not...and we will step forward into this new time. We will feel reverence for this miraculous day while also living in the sadness of this day. And, hopefully, we will be able to tell him all about it one day and why we felt these strong feelings. And hopefully he will understand.
We thank God for this day...for this boy...for this family.
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I got a real sense of Ami's silent peaceful world watching him on the swing in the park with Uncle Kel! All around him was a cacophony of sounds/noises - screaming and yelling and rock music. But Ami was just taking in his surroundings with his keen vision and sense of his world. Now he will get to experience both - would be interesting to know if he at times will miss his silent world. Maybe through this process you will get a sense from him when he needs to just turn the implants off - it may be his meditative moments that he may need to relax in certain environments. I am also quite certain that he will learn to filter out the unnecessary sounds that we in the hearing world have learned to do. Very fascinating to think about all of this - and Mel you expressed it with profound insight into your and Shayna's progression over his 8 month life as parents of a unique deaf child. Love to the 3 De Lowe's from Nana J.
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