The first day Emma wore her hearing aids, we walked out of the clinic into the parking lot, and a semi went roaring 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 right there on the curb and cried in front of half of Sioux Falls.
On the drive home, she made me pull over at a rest stop so she could listen to the birds. She stood in the grass by the picnic tables with her head tipped to one side for ten whole minutes. A trucker walking to the restroom asked if she was all right.
“I can hear the birds,” she told him.
He looked at me, confused. I just nodded, because I couldn’t talk.
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 every night and puts them in their little tan case on her nightstand. And every morning, she puts them back in before she even gets out of bed.
They’re behind-the-ear aids. Purple, because she picked the color. They have custom earmolds we replace every year as her ears grow, $180 a pair. They run on tiny batteries, size 312, and the battery doors lock with a little tool so a small child can’t swallow anything. Emma’s been changing her own batteries since she was seven.
Chad and I divorced when Emma was five. It wasn’t anybody’s big villain story. We married young. We both worked too much. And somewhere along the way, we stopped talking about anything but bills.
We split the furniture and the friends as fairly as we could. We sat in a mediator’s office in the county courthouse and signed a parenting plan, eleven pages long, and we agreed that Emma came first. Chad pays $612 a month in child support. He’s never been one day late.
He has her every other weekend, Friday after school until Monday morning. On Mondays, he drops her at the school curb on his way to an early shift at the co-op elevator. She hops out before the truck has quite stopped. He’d never once had reason to look at her ears.
In spring, he also helps his brother Mike on the farm, because Mike’s knees aren’t what they used to be and somebody has to string the wire.
Chad married Kendall two years ago. She’s 35, four years younger than me. She works as a loan processor at the bank in the next town over. She’s pretty and organized and keeps a very clean house.
I’d met her maybe a dozen times. Mostly in the school parking lot. Once at a Christmas program, where she sat next to Chad’s mother and clapped politely.
She was never mean to Emma, as far as I knew. She just never seemed easy around her. Emma said Kendall had a lot of rules.
That didn’t bother me. Rules are fine. Every house has them. I had my own list of rules, and Emma thought mine were just as bad.
But there had been little things.
A few months earlier, Emma came home from a weekend and told me Kendall said she “used her ears as an excuse.”
Another time, Kendall told her she didn’t need to wear her hearing aids at the supper table, because “we’re right here, we can just talk louder.”
I mentioned that to Chad on the phone. The call went sideways fast. He thought I was picking at his wife. I thought he wasn’t listening. By the end of it, we were both dragging up things from four years earlier that had nothing to do with hearing aids.
And Emma was in the next room hearing every word. Because, of course, she had her aids in.
After that night, I learned to let the small things go. Chad and I had worked so hard to stop fighting in front of her. I wasn’t going to start again over a supper table rule.
But this was not a supper table rule.
I stood at the front desk with my hand still on the phone and thought about calling Chad.
Anybody would have. It was the obvious thing. And later, more than one person asked me why I didn’t.
Here’s the plain truth. A phone call would have started a fight. And a fight wasn’t going to put sound in Emma’s ears before lunch.
Chad would get defensive. I would get sharp. He’d call Kendall, and Kendall would tell her side, and by the time anybody drove anywhere, it would be the middle of the afternoon.
And the aids were sitting at Chad and Kendall’s house, eleven miles out of town on a gravel road. Both of them were at work. Kendall’s bank was in the opposite direction. Even if Chad agreed with every single word I said, somebody would have to leave work, drive out to the house, find the case and drive back into town.
There was one more reason. It’s the one I’m least proud of.
I didn’t want to beg.
I didn’t want to call my ex-husband and ask, please, could his wife let our daughter hear. I wanted to just fix it. The way I’d fixed most things for Emma on my own for four years.
I also knew where Chad had been all weekend. Emma told me on the phone Friday night that her daddy was “fixing fence with Uncle Mike” and that she was going to help Kendall bake cookies.
In early spring in eastern South Dakota, a man helping on a farm doesn’t come in from the field until it’s too dark to see the fence line.
I would have bet the house that Chad didn’t know. I would have bet it then, and I was right. But I didn’t know I was right yet.
All I knew was that my daughter was sitting in the front row of a third-grade classroom, watching her teacher’s mouth, alone in a quiet she couldn’t get out of.
So I called the audiologist instead.
