The Hearing Aids I Brought to Recess

We found out about Emma’s hearing when she was four. She was a quiet little girl, and everybody told me that was just her nature.

My mother said I was the same way at that age. Chad’s mother said some kids are thinkers.

But I noticed things. She turned the cartoons up louder than her cousins did. She didn’t come when I called her from the kitchen, and she didn’t startle when the screen door banged.

At church she watched the pastor’s face instead of looking down at her coloring sheet like the other kids.

Her preschool did a hearing screening that spring, and she failed it in both ears.

They sent home a half sheet of paper that said “Please follow up with your provider,” and I read it standing in the driveway and felt the whole world tip a little to one side.

Our family doctor sent us to an audiologist in Sioux Falls, sixty miles down the road. It was the closest one who worked with young kids.

She sat Emma in a little booth with headphones and had her drop blocks in a bucket every time she heard a beep. Emma missed more beeps than she caught.

The diagnosis was moderate hearing loss in both ears. Nobody could tell us why. Nobody in either family had it.

The audiologist said sometimes it just happens, and that the important thing was to get her hearing now, while she was still learning to talk and read.

“Without amplification,” she told us, “she’s hearing speech like it’s coming through a wall. She gets the vowels. She loses a lot of the consonants. So ‘cat’ and ‘cap’ and ‘cab’ all sound the same to her.”

Chad sat next to me in that little office and held my hand. We were still married then. He asked good questions.

He asked whether it would get worse, and whether she would be able to play sports, and whether kids would tease her. He asked about the cost last, and he asked it quietly.

The answer was $3,400 for the pair, with the earmolds, the fitting, and the follow-up visits. Our insurance at the time paid nothing toward hearing aids.

They were listed under exclusions in the plan booklet, right below cosmetic surgery, which I thought was about the cruelest place to put them.

We put it on a payment plan with the clinic. I paid it off over two years, a little every month, the last payments coming after Chad and I had already split.

I never asked him for half. He offered once, and I told him to put it toward her school clothes instead, and he did.

The first day Emma wore her hearing aids, we walked out of the clinic into the parking lot and a semi went by on the street. She grabbed my leg and screamed.

Then she looked up at me with her eyes huge and said, “Mama, the cars are so loud.” I sat down on the curb and cried in front of half of Sioux Falls.

She’s had five years with them now. She’s in third grade. She reads above grade level. She sings in the children’s choir at church, slightly off key and very proud of it.

She takes her hearing aids out at night and puts them in their little case on her nightstand, and she puts them back in before she even gets out of bed.