damphoussed

Fellow CODA here. I was raised by a deaf single mother who had undergone intensive speech therapy as a child and is a very skilled lip reader. It's because of this that she could hold a normal job and support her family, something she claims alienated her from the deaf community because she "wasn't deaf enough" and didn't engross herself fully in deaf culture.

Everything I know about the deaf community is hearsay from my mother, but does that kind of exclusive mindset really exist?

CODA here. My mom is deaf, but lip reads and speaks well enough to where we rarely communicate through ASL (I'm not fluent anyways) and she works a normal job as a paralegal for a law firm. She has said she's faced criticism from some of her deaf peers for choosing this way of life (oddly enough, she refuses to get cochlear implants).

• Do you have a normal job?
• Are your children and significant other fluent in ASL?
• Do you lip read? If yes, how well?
• If you attended public schools at all before or after you attended Michigan School for the Deaf, what were your experiences like? Were they accommodating?