The Hearing Wife

"I was so sick, the doctor finally put me on antibiotics," my friend told me. This was at a party Fayoz and I were attending back in our dating days. I interpreted this for Fayoz, fingerspelling the word "antibiotics." "What are antibiotics?" Fayoz asked me. "You know what antibiotics are," I replied. "No I don't." "Yes you do. A-n-t-i-b-i-o-t-i-c-s" "I don't know what they are," he insisted. "You...don't? Antibiotics are how you went deaf." There was a stunned pause, then: "How did I go deaf?" Antibiotics isn't really how Fayoz went deaf. It's just a part of a story that leads me to believe it was in God's plan for Fayoz to be deaf. Fayoz had been deaf for 24 years before knowing the reason he was deaf. Can you imagine that? His parents thought they had explained it to him, but with ASL being their 5th language, and before that their communication in ge...

One of the amazing things about being a hearing wife is you can talk about pretty much whatever you want to your husband in public and people won't understand you....usually. We have had plenty of serious conversations on the train, bus, in restaurants, etc. We have learned that if people are staring at us, they are usually just enthralled with sign language and are usually not fast enough to catch what we are saying. If they are actually deaf, they will probably just introduce themselves, or they won't say anything and we will never see them again anyways (this is NYC). It gave us a lot of "alone time" when we were dating, even though we were always surrounded by people. The other day Fayoz and I were riding a bus when a REALLY scary person walked on to the bus. We see a lot of scary people in NY, but this one was seriously scary. Tattooed eyebrows crazy hair and glaring right at us with malice. I turned to Fayoz and quietly (by quiet I mean using small signs) ...