While I missed Sophie, I appreciated the time away as it gave us space to talk about what had happened and what our future would be. As we continued to tour in Ottawa and Toronto, Sophie and her diagnosis were constantly in the back of my mind. We were performing Ghost Dances, where the end of the piece has the mother leading the whole village, rocking forwards and backwards in unison. This repetitive sequence evokes a powerful feeling of oneness. In this moment, a thought occurred to me that gripped my heart like ice. Oh my God, Sophie will never hear this sound, this hauntingly beautiful Chilean music or any music – ever.
I rushed to the dressing room afterwards and sobbed. It was then I knew I couldn’t leave Sophie again. I wouldn’t leave Sophie again. Not ever. This would be my last dance. When we got back to the hotel, I told Li: ‘I have to stop. I just have to be with Sophie. We have to think about how we’re going to feel in ten years’ time if I don’t stop now to help her and give her every possible opportunity available. We’ve lost so much time already. She is already eighteen months old!’
Li stared at me. ‘Oh, Mary, you think that’s best?’
‘I really do. It’ll be the best for all of us.’
This decision ripped through my soul and I sobbed even harder as Li held me. He felt so sad for me. He was also going to lose his ballet partner, but there was no question: our daughter was more important. I had known that one day I would have to stop dancing. But I hadn’t known when that day would come until I walked off that stage and into the freezing Canadian night.
I was exhausted from all the worrying and thinking and decisions. When we returned to Houston, Li and I went to see Ben. I told him in a rush, ‘I’m so sorry, Ben, but I have to stop dancing. I have to be with Sophie. I have to teach her to speak. I don’t know what it’s going to take, but I have to give it a try.’
Ben leaned forward and said, ‘Mary, I understand. You need to do what you need to do for Sophie. I’m just so very sad for all of you. The door will always be open for you to come back. Don’t ever forget that.’
‘Thank you so much,’ I managed through tears.
I felt such a sense of relief. No longer would I have that rending pull between the ballet and Sophie, and with this decision I felt I regained some control of our lives. I had also taken the first step to hearing Sophie’s voice and the possibility, at some point, I hoped, of having a conversation with my daughter.
The hearing aids were finally ready, so we returned to the Houston School for Deaf Children (HSDC) for Sophie to be fitted. As I drove, I knew this would become a journey I would make many, many times. And it was just going to be Sophie and me. Although Li would always be by my side, he couldn’t always be there physically. He had to work to support our family, and that meant long hours and sometimes days and weeks away from us. Before Sophie, I had dedicated my life to ballet. From this moment on, I was going to dedicate it to my daughter.
Now I was grieving for two things: my darling daughter and my dancing career. Since Sophie’s diagnosis, our mother–daughter relationship was completely changed. The mother I thought I was and the daughter I thought I had were taken away from me. We now had to start building a new kind of relationship, one with no verbal language, with me being a different kind of mother and Sophie being a different kind of daughter. It was daunting to think about this because every time I learned more about deafness, the journey ahead appeared more difficult. Having a conversation with my daughter now felt like an impossible dream.
Li saw my pain and even offered to give up his own career to teach Sophie instead. His generosity meant so much to me but I knew it had to be me, as he was still learning English. His pronunciation was still all over the place. In any case, it was no use grieving for my career as there was nothing else I could do about it. My only goal in life was for Sophie to have her own voice.
Due to her profound level of deafness, Sophie’s hearing aids were huge. I was shocked by the size of them. They were as big as her ears. Carol fitted a little piece of plastic tubing to hook the hearing aids around Sophie’s ears so they wouldn’t fall off every time she moved her head.
I also learned the hearing aids had to be pushed in quite aggressively to fit flush into Sophie’s ears. If the placement wasn’t airtight, the devices would whistle and not function properly. As I practised putting them on, I kept smiling and acting as if it was a fun game. Sophie was so good about it, she didn’t even throw them off. We sat alone in the same sound booth as before. I could hear the beeps and, once again, willed her to react to the sounds. This was not even hearing – this was just detecting the difference between sound and silence. Listening and language were things she would have to learn.
After what seemed the longest hour of testing, it was finally over. The results, with the amplification of hearing aids, now showed Sophie could detect some low-frequency sounds. After eighteen months of silence, the beeps were Sophie’s first sounds. The audiogram also revealed that she still couldn’t detect high-frequency sounds, such as ssss and shhhh.
If I had any hope before this day, it was finally quashed. I finally, fully comprehended the words that the specialist had uttered on that fateful day: Sophie was profoundly deaf. I had never felt a deeper sadness.
Putting on the hearing aids was the first step, but she also had to be okay with wearing them. ‘Sophie!’ I said loudly, slightly exaggerating my lips. ‘How lucky are you! These are your hearing aids!’ Once they were turned on, I made sure Sophie’s eyes were fixed on me when I was speaking. This ensured that I never wasted a sentence.
I was then keen to get started with speech therapy. I don’t think HSDC had ever come across anyone who wanted to move as fast as I did. There was a little white house at the back, separate from the main building, where the speech therapy was held for toddlers. We immediately started going there twice a week. Other parents dropped off their kids, but I stayed with Sophie to be part of these classes. I wanted to learn so I could repeat the lessons again at home.
The teacher started with pictures of animals. She pointed to a dog and said loudly, ‘Woof woof!’ The next step was to repeat the sounds and ask the children to point to the correct picture. More pictures followed: cow – ‘moo moo’; duck – ‘quack quack’. Mimicking these three sounds was the focus for the entire hour.
Sophie was an angel, sitting down patiently the entire time even though she was not yet two. As the lesson went on, Sophie still could not repeat the words or the sounds and she soon grew tired. When we left to go home I looked at her adorable tired little face, remembering her quizzical expression when new sensations reached her ears.
Despite her struggle with the lesson, I determined there and then to never let a moment go by when I wasn’t with her, building on what she had learned, teaching her to recognise sounds even if it would take me a lifetime. She was my daughter and I was her mother. I owed her nothing less.
As if the hearing aids weren’t already bulky enough, two months into our new routine, full of speech therapy lessons, we were given a big FM system consisting of a microphone for me to wear and a receiver to connect to Sophie’s hearing aids. The FM system was to help Sophie better hear me if she was more than a metre away. Like a trouper, Sophie took this new equipment in her stride. The system came with two specially designed bumbags, one for me to wear around my waist and one for Sophie to carry her FM receiver. Niang took one look at them and shook her head, then made a little pink silk purse to go around Sophie’s neck to hold her receiver. Sophie broke into a huge smile. It looked much better! She was happy with her new purse with her FM goodies.