The Changeling - One Mother's Diary

 

                              The latest in our popular serialisation of One Mother's Diary.

9 The Changeling

Spring 2013

The blacksmith and his wife had been blessed with two beautiful girls but what the blacksmith really wished for was a son.  So when the blacksmith’s wife announced that she was again with child there was much celebration amongst the small lakeside hamlet and much expectation and hope in the blacksmith’s heart. 

Indeed, when the son was born one beautiful May morning, the whole community rejoiced. 

Honey cakes were baked and distributed by the women and the children ran laughing and shrieking through the bluebells at the edge of the woods.  Of course, they were wise children and knew not to go into the woods where the mean-minded fairy folk dwelled.  Long into the night the blacksmith drank with the hamlet men for now he had a son to continue his trade.  

The blacksmith’s son was a fine, strong child with rosy cheeks and a fine shock of fair hair.  At the age of six months he was crawling and by nine he was walking!   But that was before Candlemass: the midpoint of winter.  It was around this dark point of the year that the blacksmith awoke to see someone or something gliding across the foot of the family bed.  He immediately sprung up screaming.  At this the dogs howled and the women shrieked.  Only the son slept on.  All eyes turned to him; was he dead?  Had a fairy entered and slipped poison between his plump, pink lips? The mother pulled him to her breast but the infant merely smiled and turned his button nose toward her warm scent. The family’s relief was palpable and all returned to sleep: the blacksmith must have been dreaming.  

Following that night, however, the boy seemed changed; at least he did to the blacksmith.  The sweet cooing noises he had previously made changed to a higher, shriller pitch.  A wantonness filled him: he refused to turn to his mother’s call.  Worse still: he would not turn to his father’s voice.  Little by little the realisation that he had been visited by a fairy on that Candlemass Eve dawned upon the blacksmith.  With a slow horror he understood that his own son had been taken and another one left in his place; a child, who looked identical but which, in reality, was a fairy child. You see, they did this, the fairy folk; from time to time they grew jealous of the perfect, human children and stole them away into the depths of the forest, leaving in their place a changeling.  But why had the fairies done this to him?  What had he done wrong? He began to search the forest sometimes leaving his forge for days at a time. But he never found the fairies and he never found his son.  And he never accepted the changeling: he couldn’t.  As the years passed and his son still refused to speak he sometimes found his wife using a sort of gesture with the changeling when they thought his back was turned. The blacksmith roared in fury.

The villagers pitied the blacksmith and on dark winters’ nights, when leafless branches scratched the wooden roofs of their tiny houses, they thanked God that the fairies had chosen his family rather than theirs.

 

I have a changeling under my roof.   Sometimes I wake around two or three o’clock in the morning.  Recently I have found myself looking in on my son as he sleeps in his bed.  The moonlight throws a pale silver light across his fair hair. 

‘You are the same but not the same.’  I whisper.

Change has happened in this house and someone doesn’t seem to be coping with it very well.  That person is me.  I feel like I am standing on quicksand or that the walls around me are constantly changing and shifting. 

There are moments, very strange moments, when I forget that my son is deaf.  And I don’t understand how this can be and how I can be so forgetful.  I write phrases on A3 cards; phrases such as:

Your tea is ready.

Would you like a drink?

It’s in the fridge.

Are you ready?

Would you like spaghetti for tea?

And I read them out to Calum pointing to the sentences as I do so.  After he has heard them a few times I then read them out (in any order) and he has to point to which sentence I am reading.  He is getting very good at this. So good, in fact, that sometimes I forget he is deaf.  This becomes especially apparent when he reads the sentences back to me and I correct his pronunciation.  On occasions (usually when I am tired) I have found myself losing my patience and saying,

‘No, no, no!  You don’t say it like that – you say it like this…’

And I suddenly realise what I am doing and I catch my breath and think – I’m reprimanding him as though he were a hearing teenager and not deaf.  So then I apologise and Calum looks confused because I am confused.

It’s at night when I lie awake in the small hours that I try to take in the enormity of what has happened to my son.  I never expected this much: I never expected the implants to make such a huge difference.  All the time, while we were going through the implant assessment, I was trying to get across to Calum that the process would make some difference but not that much difference.  I tried to explain that he would have greater access to environmental sound which would be very beneficial; he would probably hear smoke alarms, the doorbell etc.  But I was at pains to hint at the possibility that he might never make any sense of speech sounds.  And it wasn’t just me: the staff at the hospital were trying to remain realistic too.  It was Calum’s decision to have the implants and I supported that decision even though I thought - yes I did think this - I thought he faced the possibility of being hugely disappointed.

How do I put this?  That shock which some hearing parents feel when they are told that their child is deaf – well, I think I’ve got a peculiar type of reverse shock. 

Is Calum still deaf?  Of course he is.  But he’s changed.  Or he’s changing.  Sometimes I hear whispering from his room and when I look in he is reading something from a book or the computer screen and trying to pronounce it.  It’s almost like an ethereal whispering or the sound which monks must have made, before they learnt that it was possible to read silently, in monasteries centuries ago.  It’s consonant sounds I hear mostly – sh, ss and k sounds that he could never previously make or hear.

And sometimes in the night, when I check in on him, I look down and think:

‘Where did the old Calum go? When did he disappear?’

But then the voice of reason at my side tells me that all children leave; that we only ‘have’ them as children for a few short years before they become people in their own right.  Most likely, I would be saying this to myself about my son even if he were not deaf. 

Of course: I understand now.  Calum was not implanted as a toddler or a young child: he has been implanted as a teenager; the greatest period of change in a person’s life.

Today in developed countries we have so much which benefits deaf people; access to education, a freedom to learn and use sign language, the internet, digital technology and medical technology.   Sometimes, when I am lying awake at night, I thank God that Calum was born in this era and not centuries ago when deafness or disability was explained away by the wrath of God or some supernatural force. 

What happened to the blacksmith’s son, the changeling?  All research points to the sad fact that profoundly deaf children born into hearing families in communities with no knowledge of the deaf community or of sign language most likely would have had an extremely impoverished, miserable and isolated existence.

But there may have been an alternative for our changeling…

 

One day, just before midsummer, a group of troubadours visited the village.  They sang tales of wronged kings and forest dwelling dragons but also of a village in the south where the people talked with their hands.  Of course, the blacksmith’s son could not hear the troubadour’s songs.  But his elder sister could.  Before they left she asked the troubadours if there really was a village where people talked with their hands rather than their voices. The younger men shook their heads and smiled but the eldest man took her to one side and whispered that he was sure it was true.  He had heard that below London in the forests of Kent lived a community where people spoke with their hands. 

It was not long after the troubadours left that the blacksmith’s deaf son and his eldest daughter went missing.  They were never seen in the village again but rumour has it that when a large community of deaf people from the Kentish Weald sailed for Massachusetts in the 1600s they included a very fine deaf blacksmith and his hearing sister.   And, as all Deaf historians know, it is this Kentish Sign Language which when  combined with French Sign Language (as it was in the seventeenth century  in the first Deaf American school in Hartford, Connecticut) that has given us the most dominant sign language in the world today: ASL or American Sign Language.

  

Catch the next instalment here on PDDCS News. Read the other fascinating entries here.