body relax into the floor as Jan spoke. Her
words loosened the muscles that had knotted in my guts, and I breathed deeply for the first time in three months. Jan had worked with deaf children and their families her entire professional life. Child development was her life’s passion. She said Sophia was going to be fine.
On the plane ride back to California, Bill told me he had decided not to apply for the commissioner position. Sophia was the priority now. We talked about moving to Northampton. We agreed that if we were in the right place to raise Sophia, the other facets of our lives would work out. The Clarke School, and Northampton, felt promising to both of us. We decided to launch job searches in western Massachusetts, and when at least one of us found sustainable employment, we’d move.
When we arrived home from the Northampton trip, one of the messages waiting on our voicemail system was from my cousin Valerie. I dialed her back before we had lugged the last of our bags into the entryway. Bill shot me an annoyed look. I motioned to Sophia, fast asleep in her infant car seat, a justification for returning the phone call now rather than later.
“Jennifer, I think I found a death record for Judith Fleischer.”
I was struck, silent.
“Jennifer, are you there?” Valerie asked.
“Are you sure it’s our Judith Fleischer?” I sputtered.
I hadn’t known until that moment how desperately I had hoped to meet her, possibly my one remaining deaf ascendant. How I had placed my hopes for understanding my family’s deaf past—and for navigating my family’s future—on the stories I believed she alone could tell me.
That night, I sat at my desk and tried to finish writing a philosophy paper that I had started before Sophia was born. For over an hour, while Bill and Sophia slept, I stared at my computer screen and tried to make sense of my now incomprehensible academic writing. I rifled through reference books and related philosophy articles. I turned arguments over and over in my head. It was no use.
I reached for a new novel, one I had bought the same day as I’d bought the blank journal. The River Midnight , by Lilian Nattel, about life in an imaginary shtetl called Blaszka. Part of my new research program.
“Time grows short at the end of a century, like winter days when night falls too soon. In the dusk, angels and demons
walk. Who knows who they are? Or which is which. But there they are, sneaking their gifts into the crevices of change ...”
I moved myself to the living room couch and spread a fleecy blanket on top of me. In no time, I was lost in the jabber of the market square, the heat of the tavern, the swallows of mushroom soup that kept December’s early chill at bay.
Bill and I started our job searches. I bypassed the official, academic job market and instead had my dossier sent to the five colleges in the vicinity of Northampton—Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, Amherst, and UMass Amherst. During Sophia’s nap time, I typed up cover letters, trying to sound engaged and committed to my scholarly work.
Surrounding me on all sides, our floor-to-ceiling bookshelves held tome after mighty tome of the great Western philosophers. In graduate school, I revered these books. I believed that they spoke to me. But now, they were silent. Just theoretical musings for minds detached from the reality of new babies, of my baby. Some were worse than silent:
disparaging of the languageless deaf, deemed incapable of thought.
When I had started graduate work, I had fixed on the riddles that went to my core: the metaphysics of nothing, the empty set—did it not swell, like a wet cardboard box, full with its emptiness? And skepticism, the question of whether you can ever know another mind, or be known by another? If the holes, generations-deep, wouldn’t fill, I could at least stare them down into abstractions.
Bishop Berkeley’s phrase: esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) had brought me
words loosened the muscles that had knotted in my guts, and I breathed deeply for the first time in three months. Jan had worked with deaf children and their families her entire professional life. Child development was her life’s passion. She said Sophia was going to be fine.
On the plane ride back to California, Bill told me he had decided not to apply for the commissioner position. Sophia was the priority now. We talked about moving to Northampton. We agreed that if we were in the right place to raise Sophia, the other facets of our lives would work out. The Clarke School, and Northampton, felt promising to both of us. We decided to launch job searches in western Massachusetts, and when at least one of us found sustainable employment, we’d move.
When we arrived home from the Northampton trip, one of the messages waiting on our voicemail system was from my cousin Valerie. I dialed her back before we had lugged the last of our bags into the entryway. Bill shot me an annoyed look. I motioned to Sophia, fast asleep in her infant car seat, a justification for returning the phone call now rather than later.
“Jennifer, I think I found a death record for Judith Fleischer.”
I was struck, silent.
“Jennifer, are you there?” Valerie asked.
“Are you sure it’s our Judith Fleischer?” I sputtered.
I hadn’t known until that moment how desperately I had hoped to meet her, possibly my one remaining deaf ascendant. How I had placed my hopes for understanding my family’s deaf past—and for navigating my family’s future—on the stories I believed she alone could tell me.
That night, I sat at my desk and tried to finish writing a philosophy paper that I had started before Sophia was born. For over an hour, while Bill and Sophia slept, I stared at my computer screen and tried to make sense of my now incomprehensible academic writing. I rifled through reference books and related philosophy articles. I turned arguments over and over in my head. It was no use.
I reached for a new novel, one I had bought the same day as I’d bought the blank journal. The River Midnight , by Lilian Nattel, about life in an imaginary shtetl called Blaszka. Part of my new research program.
“Time grows short at the end of a century, like winter days when night falls too soon. In the dusk, angels and demons
walk. Who knows who they are? Or which is which. But there they are, sneaking their gifts into the crevices of change ...”
I moved myself to the living room couch and spread a fleecy blanket on top of me. In no time, I was lost in the jabber of the market square, the heat of the tavern, the swallows of mushroom soup that kept December’s early chill at bay.
Bill and I started our job searches. I bypassed the official, academic job market and instead had my dossier sent to the five colleges in the vicinity of Northampton—Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, Amherst, and UMass Amherst. During Sophia’s nap time, I typed up cover letters, trying to sound engaged and committed to my scholarly work.
Surrounding me on all sides, our floor-to-ceiling bookshelves held tome after mighty tome of the great Western philosophers. In graduate school, I revered these books. I believed that they spoke to me. But now, they were silent. Just theoretical musings for minds detached from the reality of new babies, of my baby. Some were worse than silent:
disparaging of the languageless deaf, deemed incapable of thought.
When I had started graduate work, I had fixed on the riddles that went to my core: the metaphysics of nothing, the empty set—did it not swell, like a wet cardboard box, full with its emptiness? And skepticism, the question of whether you can ever know another mind, or be known by another? If the holes, generations-deep, wouldn’t fill, I could at least stare them down into abstractions.
Bishop Berkeley’s phrase: esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) had brought me
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