Deaf Like Me

Tom and Louise Spradley are Lynn’s parents. Tom is the narrator and co-author of the book, and all of the events are told through his eyes. He is a math teacher, while Louise is a homemaker. Tom and Louise both love their daughter immensely but hold prejudices against disability and deafness. Their Obsession with “Normal” clouds their ability to recognize that the oralist approach is not helping Lynn learn to speak. They want Lynn to be “normal” so badly that they ignore The Importance of the Deaf Community, which could help her communicate. This does change over time as they watch Lynn struggle to make her desires, thoughts, and feelings known. After years of resisting ASL, Tom and Louise realize that it actually helps Lynn lip read more effectively. It is oralism, not sign language, that isolates deaf children. 

As Tom and Louise learn more about the Deaf community, they realize they have been badly misinformed. Instead of helping Lynn learn, they have isolated her from her best hope of communicating in a native language. To Tom and Louise’s credit, once they realize this, they work hard to make up for lost time. Learning ASL is difficult for them, but they make the effort so that the burden of communication does not fall solely to Lynn. They move past their prejudice against deafness and overcome their obsession with normalcy. Through Deaf Like Me, Tom hopes to help other parents work through the same prejudices, warning them not to follow the path that he and Louise did. He concludes the book as a staunch advocate for sign language and the Deaf community.

Other than her parents, Lynn’s family consists of her older brother Bruce, her uncles, and her grandparents. Bruce is four years older than Lynn. From the time that Lynn is born, Tom and Louise compare her to Bruce to determine whether she is developing “normally.” Their comparisons sometimes backfire and lead them to dismiss certain signs of Lynn’s deafness. When Lynn sleeps through loud noises, they explain this to themselves by recalling that Bruce was also a deep sleeper as a baby. As Lynn ages, her differences from her brother become undeniable, prompting Tom and Louise to get her hearing checked. Bruce is a kind older brother, though he is sometimes frustrated by Lynn’s inability to understand him. When the whole family starts to learn ASL, Bruce picks up the new language much faster than his parents and is instrumental in helping them become more fluent. 

Lynn has four grandparents who love her very much. Tom suspects that Lynn loves them too, as she loves to play with them and gives them hugs and kisses, but he is never sure if she knows exactly who they are, as they are not able to explain to her the concept of grandparents without language. When the Spradleys start to learn ASL, Tom’s mother also makes the effort to learn, though her arthritis makes signing painful. Tom observes that “[c]ommunication with [her] gave Lynn a profound sense of acceptance” (268). Lynn is very sad when Tom’s mother dies. It is the first time that her parents have been able to talk with her about death, and it takes her some time to realize that death means her grandmother will not be coming back. One of Lynn’s uncles co-wrote Deaf Like Me with Tom, but he does not appear in the narrative. Lynn mentions in her Epilogue that her uncle is dead and that Deaf Like Me helps her remember and connect with him.

For the first five years of Lynn’s life, Tom and Louise follow the guidance of proponents of oralism. Most of these people are not d/Deaf but present themselves as authorities on deafness. At first, the doctors and audiologists at the John Tracy Clinic make it seem like Lynn will easily learn to lip read and speak. Audiologists and teachers highlight the importance of treating Lynn like a “normal” child and tout the benefits of hearing aids to “augment” Lynn’s hearing. These claims are misleading, as hearing aids vary in usefulness from one person to another. Often, Lynn’s teachers and doctors avoid answering Tom and Louise’s direct questions. When the Spradleys and other parents ask specialists and teachers when their deaf children will learn to speak, they are vague and blame the parents for their children’s “failures.” People like Jill Corey—a tutor who works with deaf children—also give Tom and Louise misguided hope, assuring them that eventually Lynn will learn to speak.

Oralists give a few examples of deaf adults who have learned to lip read and speak as a way to distract from the difficulty of the task at hand. Proponents of oralism uphold Carolyn Graves’s ability to speak, for example, as an achievable standard for all deaf children, even though Tom and Louise never learn if she was profoundly deaf from birth or became deaf at some point in her childhood. At the end of the book, the Spradleys meet the parents of a deaf child. Their son Mark has only ever had an oral education. He is around eight years old and cannot lip read or speak, but his parents still hold out hope that one day he will finally be able to. Mark’s case shows what might have happened to Lynn if her parents had not learned ASL.