A mother cries

Today I cried. I cried because for the first time in a long while telling someone their hearing is normal is simply not enough. It is not enough because it doesn't answer any questions but instead raises a few more. It is not enough because it means something else, something more, something frightfully insurmountable. 

Here is a child who has the potential to be happy, who by all appearances look normal. Yet his mother knows that not to be the case. She knows because while he can be seemingly content right at this moment engaged in his movie, the moments of inexplicable outbursts and frustration would last much longer, and there is nothing that she can do to comfort him. 

Her attempts at affection were rejected; no hugs, no kisses, no hand holding, no singing. So daily she feels dejected. She can't share with him the comfort food of her childhood, the recipes she knew by heart, because texture, colours, and certain tastes may send him careening into a wailing siren of distraught. So he cries and she silently weeps. 

He may hum, but he would not mimic the words she wishes to teach him. Words like I, Love, and You; words she uttered over and over again, yet it doesn't seem to ever register, and never uttered once in return. He may be the one not speaking, yet it is her who is always the one at lost for words. 

She knew his eyes are blue with flecks of gold, they were her eyes after all. There was a time she could stare deep into them, lost in their colours, a kindred spirit. She pines for those days again, when those eyes would meet her even for a split second. At least she thinks to herself she may catch a glimpse of the soul she knows to be there. 

So there we were, in a small booth, but the distance between a mother and her child remains ever so wide. "A hearing loss, a hearing loss I can deal with," she says over and over, "but this, this I don't know."

And so we sat and cried, together.