Since of the age of sixteen I have been unable to hear out of my right ear.  This first thing people usually say is,

” Pardon, what was that?”

And somehow that is supposed to be funny. Maybe it is? Just too real for me! The loss of hearing in my right ear had a profound affect on my personality it made me pause and look inwards as I adjusted to the loss of hearing and other surprising effects.

One effect was certain sounds, even now are so painful that I feel them through my entire body. I thought I was imagining this but recently my audiologist confirmed that what I was describing was real.

The second effect, seemingly unconsciously ( I now realise) is that from the time nerve loss stole my hearing at 16, I have lip read. Deciphering the hard-edged consonants and guessing the rest. Until I got my bone anchored hearing aid ( go google that!)  my body carried the unbelievable tension of focused listening.  My energy  strained and tied up in knots. This was from decoding language all day. I tried to make sense of the world, what people were saying and where the heck the sound actually came from. Here’s the thing though, deciphering communication is not just for the deaf..

The strain of understanding and listening, not just responding is real. Now with social media and our everyday habit of texting ( because who wants to call and have a conversation? ) things tend to get lost in translation. There are dangers that meaning can be lost, and all you are left with is punctuation or emoji’s to decode meaning.

Goodnight.

or

Goodnight!

or

Good night

or

Goodnight x

Gosh what do they all mean?

If my text bubble is bigger than their’s , am I talking too much? Should my text bubble be equal in size? If I respond last, is it their turn to initiate text next? Let me know people if you know the rule?

Ah the intricacies of text and meaning. Then there is the text mishap, chatting for two whole minutes with a Bestie before realising it’s your other Bestie who has been too polite to say something and when they do they text;

“Yes you called me  ( insert other Bestie’s name!) Notice I didn’t even care. It’s all good.”

Feel awful but reassured at the same time by the support of such fantastic friends!

Or the equally as embarrassing like on FB , the like you never meant to send, and too late to rescind. Oh God! Now everyone thinks I’m into some really kinky stuff, Omg!

Too late

Actually my kids have told me off about my texting.

“No full-stops mum!”

“Did you even read what you said? ”

Followed by a screenshot of a terrible jumble of letters or an amazing typo where I am suggesting they ate their friends, damn predictive text!

Perhaps it’s best to avoid losing meaning in text and social media by actually talking now and then, pardon me!

When my youngest child came to me with an issue last week, I felt his pain. Kids had made fun of him and he didn’t like it. Last time a child of mine had an issue like this my ex husband invested in a punching bag and boxing gloves and taught that child to fight. Having grown up in a non-violent mainly female household this made me very uncomfortable, and incidentally didn’t solve things for that child. The problem is, for this child it is intermittent and the school might see it as “saying mean things” rather than bullying which is regarded as ongoing systematic mean things everyday.

To me saying a mean thing is reportable. I thought I should report it. Then I heard another parent talking about some mean things that had been said to their child. I thought that she would be validated and that the friends would support her instead they pointed out that the perpetrator can actually be very nice but they had some quirks! Some quirks! My friend’s child had been in tears. My friend retreated, saying to the group,” I guess it’s good for my child’s resilience.” I then thought better of reporting the situation.

Mean things should not be tolerated or smoothed over, if someone is upset we need to support them. You see meanness resonates badly for me, bullying resonates badly for me. Until I moved to a rural school in early primary school I had never experienced bullying.  Once I had been there for a week, It was relentless, it started with me not wearing a uniform, being smart (apparently a girl in particular was meant to say to a compliment if something was good, “You reckon, it’s not really”) and speaking with a posh voice (My Mum is from NZ, so some of my vowel sounds were/are different; I say dance where lots of the kids said “dence”) apparently this was enough to be targeted, my art work on the display would be the only one defaced, I would be kicked and prodded, one memorable day a boy in my class pushed me against the shelter shed wall and as he did it seemed he was looking into me to see what was the most hurtful thing he could say,”Robbo you’re so ugly” he snarled as he held my neck and pushed my head against the boards. I never reported it, dobbers weren’t accepted, but it has stayed with me my whole life.

Mean words stick, it is a deliberate choice and action by the perpetrator to do and say those things, if someone has been affected by this, it should be reported and I don’t care if the child has called it bullying and it is just mean words! Words hurt! I shall be following up my child’s hurt and hope there will be something of closure.