Like many children of deaf adults, Abigail Poulton had to step in to interpret in sign language for her mother, Lesley Sheldon.
Poulton remembers having to do so on parent-teacher evenings. “I didn’t change what they said but I probably made it sound a little bit better than it maybe was,” she says.
Ninety per cent of children of deaf adults (Coda) are born hearing, which often means they have to develop unusual levels of empathy at an early age.
“As a kid you just want it to be easy,” Poulton says. But she learned to make adjustments, giving her mother scripts to school plays ahead of time so she could follow the performance.
She would prepare before bringing a friend home. “You just do the introductory speech: ‘So my mum’s deaf – there’s a few things you can do to help her understand you. Look her in the eyes, speak a little bit slower and try to be clear.’
“Obviously there’ll be times where I’d love to not have to say those things but it just became the regular thing … and then it was up to them.
“Growing up as a Coda, you get given the responsibility of becoming more aware of other people’s varying needs, not only with hearing loss or deafness, but also accessibility on the whole.”
She still remembers her anger as a child when the family booked sessions for movies with subtitles but none appeared. “We walked out many times.”
She says she had a “beautiful and very visually based childhood” but there were some concessions.
“Maybe a part of my youngest self had to surrender and dissolve, in order for me to take on that responsibility. Maybe I matured a little bit quicker than most children with that general awareness.”
Sheldon says she had been apprehensive about how the relationship with a hearing child would work.
“Before I became a mother for the first time I had a nightmare, thinking I’m going to have my child trying to talk to me in the street and I couldn’t understand him and that strangers in the streets would judge me.
“That was my fear, but it was the total opposite.”
Many deaf people become experts in nonverbal cues. Sheldon, a former social worker, says watching an 18-month-old child with a hearing mother, “I would be able to get what the … child was trying to tell her mother long before she did.”
Poulton says being attuned to the way people communicate with their bodies and through facial expressions because of her experience with deafness has been indispensable in her work as an actor, and now as a yoga and meditation teacher.
But in many countries deaf children have been encouraged as part of “mainstreaming” not to use sign language.
Ramas McRae is studying for a PhD at Deakin University on the mental health effects on deaf children growing up with or without access to sign language.
McRae was born deaf to deaf parents in Lithuania, then part of the Soviet Union, where deaf people were housed in the same apartment blocks, sent to boarding school together and worked together in the same factories.
Deaf people were mocked in the street for signing, he says, so the deaf spaces felt “like coming in from the cold and sitting in front of the fire, having that warmth that gets right through to your bones and you re-energise to go back out into the snow again”.
Despite the challenges he’s faced being deaf, McRae says the benefits are also huge. “There’s no way I’d be in this situation today [working towards a PhD], if my parents were hearing.
“My personal view is that I would have less opportunity because I wouldn’t have been able to see them facing all the barriers they had to face and get around them.”
McRae says he learned particularly from his mother’s ability to seize opportunities. She was denied employment and education under the communist system but when Lithuania opened up to the west organised a cohort of deaf people over 40 to enrol in courses at the UK’s Open University.
“It’s society at large who imposes those barriers,” he says. “That’s where the barriers come from, not from the individuals who face them, and I think Mum demonstrated that to me.”
Jodie Labagala, a hearing Coda, says she didn’t feel different or even notice for quite a long time that her parents were different, because she and her siblings “had such a positive experience and such a wonderful childhood”.
She describes the thriving Adelaide deaf club in the 1980s and 90s – where her parents met and she spent much of her childhood – as her family’s “spiritual home”.
The club occupied a heritage building in the city centre, with a ballroom, bar and a pool table. “It was very much a community-coming-together place.”
Labagala could sign before she could speak, and so describes Auslan as her first language.
Interpreting for her parents as she grew up, she learned that it’s not just translation.
“Interpretation is different in that you need to convey tone and emotion,” she says. “Auslan is a very linguistically complex language.
“You don’t translate word for word, there’s non-manual features in it, there’s a lot of facial expression and body language that comes into it.”
As an adult she thought about becoming an interpreter but never made the commitment.
“I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about becoming an interpreter for a while. I was like, do I want to do that? I did it all my childhood. Do I want to do that as a profession?”
Despite being fluent in Auslan, Labagala would still have been required to take a course to become accredited with the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters.
“I felt that I had a natural ability, and I wasn’t super keen to study alongside people who were learning it from scratch.”
But when she moved from Adelaide to Melbourne she found a short course was available as an alternative pathway for those who were already fluent.
“I’d spent 10 to 15 years as an adult at that point and not around the deaf community as much, having moved out from my parents’ house and travelled. And then here I was in a course with 20 other Codas. It was phenomenal. We were just like, these are our people, we’ve all grown up the same.
“We all have the same sort of inside jokes and home signs and slang, Auslan slang.
“It was really life-changing. I found myself working in the deaf community now and I use Auslan every day at work. It’s like being home.”
