What’s going on? Am I missing out on something? Or should I say on something else: all the opportunities for small-talk that might make me feel more comfortable and confident in asking if your child wants to come to ours for tea, because our kids are friends. I am bamboozled. I feel the opening gambit has been lost.
My audiologist is great. He tries everything, but it’s about how the brain processes the reduced amount of sound I get, which is about half what anybody else might hear. Lip-reading goes only so far. I’d swap my arm for your hearing. Or my leg. It depends what day it is and how many times I’ve had to get someone else to answer my phone. Or how many times I’ve had to ask the woman in the supermarket to repeat herself, only to realise she’s asking if I have a loyalty card, as she has every other time I’ve been at her till. As a single dad, I’m in the shop a lot.
I think everybody else is friends, and even if I know this is untrue and ridiculous, it still bothers me. I can see fractures after a couple of years, anyway. People who have excised themselves from cliques, new ones brewing. I’m good at reading people’s faces, but I’d rather know what they were all going on about.
I worry I’m stopping my child from having the life yours have. I worry I won’t pick up on something he says, and he won’t repeat it because he’s embarrassed or tired. Could he miss out on a school trip because of me? Will he tell me about his work, because it takes so long? Maybe I’ll miss a clue that he’s being bullied, or not get the punchline to his jokes. It’s exhausting, because I’m deaf all the time. I even dream in mumbles.
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