Lipreading Mom

Hearing with a CI for the first time

What is the first sound you remember hearing?

Auditory memory for hearing babies begins in the womb. They become aware of sounds, such as a loving mom’s voice.

From early childhood on, I am amazed at the words, sounds, and conversations I remember.

As my family’s car pulled away from the hospital, I remember my mother saying, “Here’s your baby sister.” She held our newborn family member in her lap in the front seat. Mom gazed at the baby while pointing to my older sister. “That’s your second momma,” my mom said to the baby.

‘What about me?’ I remember thinking. I was three-and-a-half years old.

On the first day of kindergarten, the teacher handed photocopied coloring sheets to me. “You didn’t bring a coloring book?” she asked. “It’s okay, you can color these.” 

On Christmas day that year, my parents rushed over to console me. “It’s okay, Shanna,” my mom said. Great-grandpa “Poppy”, who was usually the most loving grandparent, shouted, “I don’t wanna look at it!” I had waved a new handheld mirror in his face, one of my favorite Christmas presents. Nobody told me until later that Poppy was in a lot of pain from cancer. He would pass away less than a week later.

The summer before second grade, my family moved to an 80-acre farm. Bird songs became the musical soundtrack of childhood summer days. On summer nights, a chorus of chirping crickets and croaking frogs lulled me to sleep. 

My hearing loss became more noticeable as the years went on. While holding my firstborn son at home during maternity leave, I couldn’t hear the doorbell ring or the cell phone chime or the landline phone ring. I remember hearing someone on the answering machine ask in a loud voice, “Shanna, are you there!?!”

At age 29, I wore hearing aids for the first time. The roar of nearby highway traffic overwhelmed me as I left the audiologist’s office. The world suddenly became more amplified.

Two more children joined my family as years passed. Their first words are unforgettable. My oldest son said “ha” as in “hot” because he often hung at my hip in the kitchen while I cooked. As his little hand reached for the stove, I said, “No. Hot.” 

“Da” for “dad” was my daughter and youngest son’s first word. Their second word was “ma-ma-ma”.

Two weeks ago, my husband sat behind me as an audiologist activated my cochlear implant. He repeated a question that I could hear and understand: “Can you hear me whisper?” 

I went for a walk in the park the day after activation. The CI allowed me to hear something I hadn’t heard in 20-plus years. It reminded me of a favorite auditory memory from childhood: the musical soundtrack of bird songs. 

These happy, bittersweet, miraculous sounds and words are auditory memories I will not forget.