Partially deaf and alone in Appalachia, cooking for my son saved me.
You’re a good boy, you’re a good baby
, in that singsong way that parents communicate—half-asleep, half unconsciously. Over and over again until he knew it, believed it.Soon, our world was filled with his high, happy chatter. I had avoided cooking with loud kitchen appliances like blenders and grinders, not able to hear him above their growl, but my son wasn’t shy about coming into my view when he knew I couldn’t hear him. He tugged on my shirt. He waved his hands before my eyes.
His enthusiasm for food was the same enthusiasm he would soon bring to everything: books, animals, the few hours of preschool I could afford, meeting other kids and adults.for some reason. Once he learned to open the fridge door, he would pull out sriracha and suck on the bottle, trying to open it with his teeth. He started waving away the children’s menu at age five, trying rabbit, octopus, tofu. But his favorite foods are simple Appalachian foods: foraged ones.
He talked constantly—his happy babble alerting me that he was crawling backward down the stairs, coming into the kitchen, announcing himself loud enough for me to hear. Unlike almost everyone else I have met in my life, I didn’t have to explain my deafness to him, didn’t have to tell him what to do, how to communicate with me. He knew. He knew from the beginning: It’s just part of me.
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