My mum partially lost her hearing at the same time that she was diagnosed with cancer three years ago. I say partial, but it was so bad she couldn’t hear the doctor’s diagnosis or discuss her treatment options. Instead, my dad, my five siblings and I explained everything to her in our loudest voices on a very small ward. The other patients knew her business because curtains, though perfect for cloaking shapes and figures, are decidedly shit at soundproofing.
Now, with much shorter hair and a greater understanding of the brevity and beauty of life, my mum’s in remission. However, despite an operation on her ears, her hearing has never fully returned. While it’s changed her, it’s also re-shaped the dynamic of my family perhaps even more so than the cancer did. While her lymphoma was a short, sharp shock that upended everything for a fixed-time period, her deafness has slowly crept in around us, like a creeping fog. The power lines of communication are gently eroding.
Here are the things I’ve learned since my mum started going deaf:
Hearing aids aren’t perfect
Like an Etonian on his gap year, my mum’s hearing aid has travelled far and wide. I think she mislays it on purpose because wearing it would be a sign of weakness. But she tells me it’s a faff to put on and the world is just far too noisy when she wears it. It seems she’s grown accustomed to a life with the volume on low and likes the way she can pick and choose who she interacts with.
Isolation feels like the answer
My mum’s first language is Urdu and, although she’s a fluent English speaker, she has to concentrate a lot more to keep up when there are lots of people around. So she actively avoids groups because she can’t follow their conversations. She’s also told me she doesn’t want to inconvenience people by asking them to repeat themselves. While some older people isolate themselves because they don’t want to address their body’s failures out of a stubborn pride, my mum just doesn’t want to be a bother.
You wonder if a part of her has gone
When my siblings and I were old enough to go to school my mum started working part time. She taught South Asian women how to read and write English and worked for a charity that supported single parent families. People were her passion. My mum’s favourite pastime is to watch Pakistani drama serials on YouTube because she can pop her earphones in and listen easily without disturbing anyone. She slinks into one side of a fully made-up bed, and I watch her, thinking about all the things that have led to this moment. Her childhood in Karachi, moving to the UK with my dad, raising six children, teaching ESOL [English for Speakers of Other Languages] classes, learning to swim, preparing countless chapattis, helping me read the Q’uran, losing her hair, going through chemotherapy and now making sense of and amends with a pair of ears that no longer want to co-operate. All of that history condensed and concentrated in her 5ft 1 frame.
It makes me sad to see her there in isolation. She looks thinner and older every time I visit and it astounds me that her body, now exhausted and drained, created six adults with jobs and lives and husbands and children of their own. I’ve been away growing and flourishing while she’s been fading and shrinking and when I return, I feel like time is slipping by and I need to catch it, to stop it still, because I don’t know what I’d do without my mum. Sometimes she seems content with her lot, like a placid baby – her double bed the crib and the internet her pacifier – but other times it looks like she’s trapped in silence, like a child trying to quench their thirst with drops of rain. She gets irritable and annoyed because she can’t reach what’s so close.
I inadvertently upset her
It can be a challenge spending time with someone who constantly asks you to repeat yourself. I recently told my mum that my last smear test detected some abnormal cells and she thought – for 10 minutes – that I was talking about a driving test. It turns out there’s a finite number of times you can shout ‘ABNORMAL SMEAR TEST’ before your throat hurts.
I'd tried to bring it up casually so she wouldn't think it was a big deal but repeating it over and over, each time louder and louder, did the opposite. Her face was stricken and her worry made me worry too. She cares about me more than I care about myself, I thought, and I felt a palpable wave of emotion that made me want to gulp down a sob. But it came out as a shout instead. A mean, shouty command to, for God's sake, put her hearing aid on. Repeating conversations about difficult subjects that make you feel vulnerable is tough and sometimes it's easier to shout than admit you want to cry.
Repeating conversations about difficult subjects that make you feel vulnerable is tough. So in the end, I feel like a heartless cow, my mum feels like she’s a burden, there are tears, apologies and cups of tea. The next day it begins again.
You might also be interested in:
The Weird Places Your Relationship With Your Mum Can Go When She Has Cancer
'I Spent My Childhood Wishing My Parents Would Get Divorced'
Follow Javaria on Twitter @javaria_akbar
Photograph: Luke & Nik
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.