What My Mother Taught Me About Communicating

Commentary

I’m an American expat who has lived in Italy for almost five years, but I have yet to get the hang of the Italian language. The result is a bonus both surprising and saddening. I now have an inkling of how my mother must have felt through much of her life. Namely, lost.

Here’s one reason why. I still speak only a smattering of Italian and understand even less. My study of the language has enabled me to maintain conversations with locals that usually last no more than a minute or two. I run out of words and they of patience. Or we strike a deal. I pretend to follow what they’re saying and they accord me the same courtesy.

But here’s the other reason. My mother was profoundly deaf. She was stricken with spinal meningitis six days after her first birthday. The disease left her unable to hear much of anything, including conversation. She was trained from an early age to speak and read lips well, but she often had a hard time understanding, and being understood by, hearing people.

I would serve as her interpreter as a boy and young adult. By age three I was getting on the phone for my mother with her own mother, repeating whatever each said to me to the other, mainly to share updates and schedule visits. I also played go-between for her as an adolescent and teenager as we ran neighborhood errands, ordering her meals in restaurants and speaking on her behalf with bank clerks and supermarket cashiers.

I also translated for my mother at holiday gatherings as my uncles, aunts and cousins, all of whom could hear, talked among themselves around the dinner table. She would tap me on the shoulder to ask me what so-and-so said, or why everyone was laughing, or whether an argument had broken out. I always summed up the back and forth as her language broker, acting as her voice and ears.

Only now, at age 74, do I have even a glimmering of my mother’s difficulties with vocal speech among the hearing population. Only now, living as I do in a small ancient hillside town where most residents speak only Italian—and where I grasp only a word here and there, but little more—have I finally begun to recognize how my mother must have felt struggling to cope with her deafness and communicate with people lucky enough to be blessed with hearing.

The Italians here invariably expect me to understand the Italian spoken to me, just the same as hearing people invariably expected my mother to understand vocal language. I now feel, at least somewhat, as she must have felt then—incompetent, dysfunctional, often requiring a translator and forever an outsider.

As it happens, more people around the world are running into language barriers than ever before. An estimated 304 million people, almost four out of every 100 inhabitants of the planet, have migrated to other countries as of mid-2024, nearly double the number in 1990 and about four times more than in 1960, according to the United Nations. Many of those people are, like me, trying to learn a second language.

Recent research about the children of deaf adults, known as CODAs, is relevant in this connection. Some studies find that CODAs may live in a kind of limbo, caught in the crossfire between two cultures (just as some expats do when learning a new language). Other analyses indicate that the responsibility of translating for a deaf parent can lead to CODAs feeling overwhelmingly stressed and frustrated (also similar to some expats).

But on the flip side, some studies conclude that CODAs learn from playing interpreter at a young age to communicate better personally and professionally later in life, and may grow up endowed with special talents for conveying and reading facial expressions and gestures.

My mother managed to function more or less all right through her 91 years. She stayed friends with deaf childhood classmates for decades. She spoke to other deaf people in sign language, her fingers flashing and her hands dancing. She befriended next-door neighbors who could hear and learned to carry on conversations with her. She came to feel confident enough to deal with clerks and other hearing strangers face-to-face. She even took a job late in life as a bookkeeper in a law firm.

Likewise, I make do. My Italian vocabulary has expanded to hundreds of words and some key phrases. I make small talk with locals as best I can manage. I also act out, resorting to mime with my face and hands, as I would so often do with my mother. I’m especially big on nodding here, just as I would often do—vigorously and of necessity—to make sure my mother knew I understood her speech.

Slowly, I’m making acquaintances and even friends, gaining entry, if ever so gradually, into the mainstream here.

Such are the parallels between my life then and my life now. Past truly turns out to be prelude after all. My experiences as a go-between for my mother taught me to communicate better with my neighbors here in Italy. It’s as if every time I talk with a native Italian, I’m once again a child trying to speak with my mother. And, in the bargain, getting a second chance at doing it better.

So speak to your mother today. Make sure you understand her. But also make sure she understands you.

Originally published on The Baltimore Sun

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.