It’s A Sign!
Completely unexpectedly last autumn, I fell in love. At 63 years old, having been married to husband-of-the-year for over 30 years, having had all of the grandchildren I am likely to have, POOF! just like that, completely out of the blue, I fell in love. I am talking about the kind of crazy, drunken, cannot-get-enough-of-it-love. I was looking for something new in life, something that would be interesting and challenging, and a friend suggested I take a class in American Sign Language (ASL). I had always wanted to learn to sign, so I enrolled in a community based class and, in about 2 classes, I was hopelessly hooked. I could not get enough signing.
I had never spoken a second language, I knew exactly zero people who sign, and I had no prospects of being in a community where signing would be used or useful. In fact, I live in communities where people either question why I would even consider learning to sign at my age, or they admire me for the courage it takes to try. Still, all I could think of is signing and all that kept showing up, to be completely honest, is the gap between my ability to sign and the level of proficiency needed to actually communicate through ASL.
There are on-line educational sites (elearning Industries) that say that ASL is one of the easiest languages to learn because so many of the signs have commonplace gestures we already use; however, most other sources do not agree. The general consensus is that the basics are easy enough to learn; however, to really learn enough of the basics to have a conversation takes a 60-90 hour commitment, with additional help from someone who is proficient in signing. What is not noted in this estimate is that those 60-90 hours also involve some level of muscle memory from your hands (not to mention the actual memorization of letters and signs) and that you can really only practice so long before your hands need a rest. And none of that takes into account the difference between expressive and receptive language.
I do not know how many hours I have put into learning to sign, but I am pretty sure I am somewhere in the thousands of hours range. At last count, I had over a hundred hours of formal instruction, which does not take into account any time practicing with other students or what feels like the hundreds of hours I have spent studying my notes, practicing with Hubs or watching online fingerspelling exercises until my eyes cross. And I would say I am exactly nowhere near even close to being able to have a conversation without the frequent use of slow and repeat. I am progressing, for sure.
I am an old Catholic School girl who grew up diagramming sentences, learning about vowel teams and diphthongs and who would never, ever end a sentence in a preposition. I soon discovered that writing and signing the same complete sentence is a very different exercise. I was taught to speak and write by what are now considered “old school” grammar and mechanics, which is also, by default, how I think. And while it might seem blatantly obvious that language completely defines how we see the world, it is not until we actually experience the differences in those worlds that we can see just how dissimilar those worlds can be.
I knew I was going to need more support than my once a week class if I was really going to learn to sign, so I hired a tutor to help me, which is how I met Whitny. Whitny is a 28 year old woman who is Deaf, whose family are all hearing and who grew up in both the Deaf and hearing communities. Ninety percent of families with a Deaf child do not learn to sign, however, as soon as Whitny’s mom learned that Whitny was Deaf, she began to learn to sign and to access services for her daughter.
I was nervous to meet Whitny because I knew that I could sign about ten words and I had no idea how she was going to be helpful given the level of what I knew I didn’t know. Thankfully, a lot of Deaf people use a white board to help bridge the communication gap between the deaf and hearing. That whiteboard was a lifeline for me. Since Whitny grew up in both the deaf and hearing worlds, she is pretty competent at dealing with what hearing people do not know, as well as how to teach them.
In the beginning, the best I could do was the fingerspell words, which was a slow and arduous process. I had to think about signing every letter and every single letter that Whitny signed to me. Each word seemed to take forever. My most frequently used signs were “repeat” and “slow” as in slow down. There seemed to be no amount of practicing that really put me at the speed needed to proficiently fingerspell. Later, in an advanced class, some of the other students would sign to each other at what seemed like the speed of light and I had no idea how their receptive language could possibly be that good. I realized that Deaf people and people proficient at signing do not sign and read individual letters, but rather they are signing and reading actual words. I sign and read every single letter. It would be the equivalent of seeing a word, say the word is independent and, instead of reading it as independent, you would see it as I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T. A very different process.
As often happens if you stay in new and unfamiliar settings long enough, one day, completely out of the blue, something unpredictable appears that wasn’t there before and that something makes a difference. I cannot say how or when this happened, but suddenly, I could sign complete sentences and I didn’t need the whiteboard at all. My repeat and slow signs decreased and my understanding increased.
To begin with, writing or saying a complete sentence is very different from signing a complete sentence. While there are signs for words like for, the, also and because, you would not generally sign those words. Many words are just understood in signing. This means that, for the hearing person, not only are you learning to sign, but there is also what NOT to sign. And it took me quite a while to discover that signing complete sentences as I understood them, is not actually a thing. I realized then that the Deaf person is learning to sign sentences with one set of rules, while always reading and writing sentences using different sets of grammatical rules.
The second thing I learned about signing is that facial expressions are as important as the sign itself and that, in practice at least, you are signing with your hands AND your face. And even though that might sound like a no-big-deal part of the whole process, what became clear to me is that my face mostly says either concentration or confusion and that my ability to use my face in signing is limited to signing things like what-the-fuck, tired and grouchy. Other than that, my face seems frozen in a perpetual look of someone who is considering the next move.
What was really interesting to me is that the more I learned about signing and communicating the murkier the experience got for me. For instance, as someone who has had a career of working in the field of mental health, I am very used to clarifying what someone tells me, or even what I say to someone, by being sure that the nuance of what or how something was said does not change the meaning of the message. I often repeat a question in a different tone, use a different example just to double check that I am on the same page as the person across from me. Nuance is not something I can imagine being used in signing, however, I don’t know if that is a function of my inexperience, a function of the differences in the languages or if it is a function of the generational difference between Whitny and me. And, whatever the source, I certainly do not have a way to get to that information right now.
I have found that Deaf people are really generous in their interactions with hearing people who are learning to sign. It is as though Deaf people have an ability, or they develop an ability, to grant a kind of grace to those learning to sign. I have interacted with a number of Deaf people at this point and I can’t help but believe that my signing is at times confusing or flat out makes no sense, yet there is never a hint of frustration on their part. And the response is always the same, even measured corrections or a request to repeat the sign.
The more I got to know Whitny, the more our personalities began to emerge, and I discovered the discrepancies in our lives were as broad as the discrepancies in our languages. Whitny is a trained graphic designer, currently working in a special education school for students who are deaf. She lives at home with her family, plays action packed video games, likes horror movies and owns a horse, which she calls her “son” and says is the same as having a very large dog. She currently does not date, doesn’t want to have children, and aspires to write a graphic novel.
On the other hand, I am a licensed clinical social worker who has worked in a variety of settings over the years. Hubs and I raised five children and have six grandchildren. We live in a country suburb where the closest quality grocery store is at least a 30 minute highway trek. Until very recently, I was exclusively a rom-com kind of girl with a passion for things that are beautiful - think little brightly colored flowers in tiny little vases all around the house. Think blueberries and strawberries in champagne glasses so my grandchildren feel special. Like that.
Whitny and I meet these days at a local library, which seemed like a really good idea because signing is a non-verbal language and the library is a quiet setting. Despite our differences, we have developed a way of connecting that occurs as a little magical to me. To begin with, although our communication is non-verbal, we are pretty frequently the loudest duo in the library. Our laughter over signing blunders sometimes gets us the librarian stink-eye. I am pretty sure that under any other circumstances we would be reprimanded, but Whitny, I think, serves as a get-out-of-jail-free card in this particular case. Or perhaps they are looking at me flapping my hands this way and that, trying to remember the correct orientation for a particular sign and figure I am already having a tough enough time. Still, as it turns out, there are words that have no similar sounds but that do have similar signs. I found this out by confusing beneath with poop, shy with whore, joking with penis - all unenviable mistakes in any language and in any context.
I no longer text Whitny if I have something to tell her, but instead send her a video text which she most often understands. And I also now understand her return video texts, both of which I am claiming as major accomplishments in this new love affair of mine. I do have to say, however, my at least once every couple of weeks I sign the following-
“Whitny, I am 63 years old. Do you think I will live long enough to be able to actually sign proficiently?”
To which she always answers, “You are doing great!”
On a good week, I interpret her response as “Yes!” On a great week, I think she is saying “Of course you will!” But, it might just be that she is granting us both a little grace and that the actual answer is closer to “No, but gold star for trying.”