Sign Language

I absolutely love Sign Language. I fell in love with the language at age 8, seeing a beauty padgent contestant Sign a song as her tallent. 

I learned ASL (American Sign Language, an actual language with unique sentance structures) in high school, bartering with a public school deaf educator for an hour of private toutoring each week in exchange for an hour of babysitting her kids! 

I then took SEE (Signing Exact English, basically using ASL signs in educational settings, as applied to teaching English language mechanics like parts of speech, prefixes, and suffixes) in college. My second semester I was moved into the elite, invitation-only class, spending 3-6 hours per week in a 5-to-1 ratio with our professor who interpreted for a large church.

My kids learned their ABCs manually, via fingerspelling, before they learned to read. They each had 20-50 word Sign vocabularies before they could say a single word verbally. We memorized Bible verses and sang songs with Sign. (I've preferred to Sign with, or sometimes instead of, singing with my voice, since high school.)

And them came my strokes at age 39. Completely loosing use of my left arm for months (now still with limited strength and dexterity on the left, 13 1/3 years later), and some impact to the right arm as well, my physical, speech, and congnative therapists were all delighted that i had a background in Sign. I was tasked with re-learning how to Sign every song we sang at church each week, challenging my brain to re-learn how to translate on the fly, my arms to function in coordination, and my monotone voice and partially paralized vocal chords to create tone.

A little over a year after my strokes, i was DEVISTATED to discover, that while i know Sign Language intimately in actually dreaming in Sign, often recalling how a word "feels" to my body before i can speak it, I CAN NO LONGER READ SIGN LANGUAGE! 😪 

To be fair, even now, i cannot read written English fast enough to understand "closed captions" on television. But even after more than a decade of intentional study, my ability to comprehend Sign, even slowing videos down to painfully slothful ratios, is limited to maybe correctly guessing 2 or 3 letters out of any fingerspelled word, and a handful of recognizable Signs. Stroke brain in crazy!

Ironically, the strokes caused significant hearing impairment for me. Both ears were impacted, up to 90% deafness in my left ear, depending on frequency. Language processing in general is still rather scrambled in many instances. My new deafness became evident in my earliest days of stroke hospitalization, was inadequitly addressed with multiple surgeries and ear tubes through the years, then was finally stable and improved enough for hearing aids to become effectively helpful for me about 3 years ago.

So where does this leave me today? I still love the language! I have regained enough control over my voice that i can comfortably join a congregation in singing again, but i still Sign every song, often dropping my voice and praising God only with my hands. I have a heart for deaf ministry. But being unable to read Sign would cause communication to be completely lopsided if i tryed to interpret myself! My prayer is for God to raise up a fluent translator for our church, one who can do what i cannot!

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