I don't even know what I am going to say with this post, but here goes.
Miss Kat just passed her fourth anniversary of activation of her first CI. It has been a crazy four years! She has grown and blossomed in so many ways. My opinions have changed as our journey has continued. We are in such a different place than I expected when we took our first steps on this road. I was arrogant, I was misinformed and closed minded. I thought I was smarter than all the other parents. I thought that I had it all figured out. Well, life has a way of showing you how wrong you are!
Miss Kat is now functionally, completely oral. Yes, we continue to expose her to ASL, we try to attend ASL/Deaf community events, use interpreters, have her around ASL using adults and children, but on an every day basis, as a communication method, she doesn't use ASL. I certainly never saw that coming. I don't think anyone did! It was never our intention to for Miss Kat to use spoken language as her primary language. We assumed that she would be using ASL for expressive and receptive communication every day for the rest of her life. As fate would have it, that isn't how things turned out.
I thought I knew what our path looked like, and I judged others who did not choose the same. I thought we were smarter, better parents, and that we "got it" when they didn't. Again, fate stepped in an showed me that I was wrong. There is a whole other world that I had never been exposed to, a whole group of deaf people whose experiences I had never heard. My eyes were opened, and I recognized how naive I had been.
This journey has certainly been a surprise, but every day when I see how happy she is, how much she enjoys communicating, how many doors have been opened for her, I wouldn't change a thing.
