Letting go of pride

We found out that G is a candidate for a CI in his left ear. We obviously wanted one enough to ask about it and take him to be evaluated. But even finding out that he could have one, it was hard to decide if we wanted one. I had built up this image of myself as a good parent. Part of that identity was my acceptance of G's deafness and accommodating it by learning sign language. Getting a CI felt like a betrayal of that ideal.

But we want one. We want him to have a better chance of getting intelligible speech. Maybe this is naive, but we want to devote less effort to speech. Right now he just doesn't have access to most speech frequencies. With a CI, maybe the same amount of speech will have greater effect.

And we still use sign language all the time. So we have to let go of that pride. That's probably a good thing.