She was the only Deaf resident there. Her only hearing son, a skilled interpreter, hardly ever visited. I don’t know their full story, but from the conversations we had about him, it didn’t seem like they shared a healthy relationship.

Back in her day, she didn’t have access to much of what I do now: closed captions, voice-to-text, hearing aids, or interpreters in healthcare. So, of course, she relied heavily on her son to bridge her to the hearing world. I don’t blame her; it’s incredibly difficult.

The hallways smelled faintly of antiseptic. I remember the slow rhythm of her hands moving through the air as we talked.

“Talking may be easy,” she signed once, “but signing is a true connection.”

I didn’t understand what she meant then. But years later, after having two hearing daughters of my own, I began to see what she meant through her eyes.

Almost every time an adult meets my kids, they ask, “Do they know signs?” I usually say, “Very little,” or “No.” Deaf/HOH adults, though, rarely need to ask. They start signing to my children right away, and my girls just look back at me, confused.

In their gestures, I sense a quiet assessment, an unspoken: Do better.

I’ve watched other Deaf/HOH parents with hearing children. Some kids refuse to sign or help their parents, especially in their teens, when independence feels like rebellion. Others learn because they want to connect more deeply, though that seems rarer.

With modern accessibility, Deaf/HOH parents no longer need to rely on hearing children the way older generations once did. Still, many feel the need to teach their children ASL. Not for dependence, but for connection, to show them the beauty of a Deaf world. It is a way to invite children into a world they might not otherwise see. A doorway into something rich and alive.

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I have a lot of uncles, but I only have one who is my favorite.

He doesn’t have kids of his own. He’s been divorced twice. But I still remember when he took me horseback riding. When he remarried my now-aunt, such a sweet lady, I remember how happy he seemed. He would laugh at my jokes and my made-up song about a horse called “Black Beauty.” He always told me I was funny and cute when I was little.

I remember staying overnight with them once. I got to see their beautiful horses and the green fields surrounding their home. That evening, I took a bubble bath. The next morning, my uncle took me to a diner for breakfast.

“Would you like some pie?” he asked.

“Pie? For breakfast?!”

He laughed.

I was maybe ten or eleven at the time. I knew pie was a dessert, but I didn’t know people ate it for breakfast.

But that morning, we did.

I think it was apple pie. I wasn’t a fan of pie until my uncle introduced me to it. It was delicious.

He gave me attention, and he never seemed bothered that I was deaf. I remember asking to see a horse’s horseshoe, just because I wanted to know what it looked like. My pronunciation wasn’t very clear back then, and he couldn’t quite understand what I was asking for.

Instead, he got me a horseshoe to take home with me.

I thought that was even better than what I had asked for.

I also remember going with my mom to meet her sisters at Olive Garden for soup and salad. I was happy to see my uncle there. He came up with the idea of dipping the breadsticks in Alfredo sauce, and I’d like to believe that Olive Garden stole the idea from him.

Then something happened in the family when Grandpa passed away, and it broke everyone apart.

My uncle chose to stop speaking to my mother. Because of that, I haven’t seen him since I was young.

I didn’t understand why I couldn’t see him anymore until much later.

About twenty years later, I heard that my uncle had decided to start speaking to my mother again.

I thought, Can I talk to him too?

My sister and mother got to see him, and they took a photo together. When I saw the photo, my heart ached a little.

He had white hair now, and he looked so much like my late grandpa.

I thought, Wow. He still looks great.

Last summer, I decided to stop by and see him for the first time since I was young.

I didn’t know what to expect.

He seemed excited to see me through our texts, but I was still nervous. At one point, he called me “sweetie.”

Then I saw him.

It was a strange feeling.

I felt like he didn’t quite know how to talk to me. Or perhaps I had forgotten how quiet of a person he was.

Has he always been this quiet?

I was able to chat with his lovely wife, my aunt, while he spent most of his time with my little girls. They went to feed the chickens and meet the dogs.

There were no horses anymore.

I was a little hurt, perhaps because I wasn’t a little girl anymore, the girl he used to spend time with back then. I was a grown adult with kids of my own.

It was kind of surreal.

I watched him put my youngest on a donkey, much like he had once put me on a horse.

Then I looked at my aunt and said, “He’s a kid at heart, isn’t he?”

She nodded.

“He has a big heart. He loves to hang out with kids,” my aunt said.

I was still trying to understand how I felt on the way home after spending the night with them. He told me to come visit again.

He seemed so tired.

I didn’t remember him being so tired back then.

I was glad I got to see them again. Still, it was strange to have this almost out-of-body experience watching him with one of my daughters, as if I were seeing my own childhood from the outside.

It was kind of like a time machine, except it wasn’t my timeline.

I was watching him with my daughter, but somehow I could see myself in her, too. I remembered being the little girl on the horse, making up songs, and thinking pie for breakfast was the strangest thing in the world.

I wasn’t only seeing my uncle again. I was seeing the person he had been in my childhood and remembering the little girl I had been when I was with him.

Maybe I wasn’t only missing my uncle. Maybe I was missing the little girl I was when I was with him.

I had to write all of this down in the hope that I could finally understand what I was feeling.

It’s been two months, and I still can’t stop thinking about my uncle. For a while, I was confused about what it was about him that made me cry.

I think I understand now.

Maybe it was because I felt calm with him. Maybe because, somehow, things felt less noisy. Maybe because he was part of a time in my life when I didn’t feel different around him.

I was just me.

Maybe that’s why I keep thinking about the pie.

Maybe some part of me wants to go back to that diner, sit across from him at the table, and be ten years old again.

“Pie? For breakfast?!”

And maybe this time, I wouldn’t question it.

I’d just smile and say, “Yes, please.”

This would be the second time that I had to take a child with me, once when my first child was a baby, and then this year with both of them.

I knew it was going to be a short appointment; I just needed new tubes, an annoying piece of the hearing aid that kept building up with earwax and getting pretty gross.

I was afraid to clean it out myself since I broke it once very close to my due date with my second child, all because the tubes had hardened and were due for replacement. It was a true headache trying to hear with one hearing aid for several weeks until it was fixed.

So, lesson learned: don’t mess with the tubes if they have hardened, but just get new ones.

If the tubes are not hardened but there’s stuff in them, it drives me insane because it messes with the sound flow that carries through my ears. So if I were desperate enough, then yes, I would do my best not to break them and clean them out myself.

It’s such a hassle to get new tubes every three to four months or so due to living in a humid area. I rarely had this problem when I lived back West because the climate was dry. I had to pay $67 each time I had to go get it fixed.

Even with insurance, it does pretty much nothing!

Anyway, back to that appointment. I get nervous when I take my kids to a place that I feel defines me. I get vulnerable about how my kids see me.

I guess, the real me?

What I could actually be like without my hearing aids, rather than how they are used to seeing me at home. I guess they are also used to me when I didn’t have my hearing aids from time to time, but it wasn’t as often as when I do wear them all the time.

The audiologist came and took my hearing aids, then left to fix them.

While we waited, I had my youngest child sit on my lap since there were no other chairs for her, while my oldest sat next to me in a different chair.

I could sense the youngest’s vibration from her body.

She’s speaking, I thought.

But I couldn’t see her face.

My oldest pointed at the internal ear anatomy diagram on the wall, the exact same one I stared at as a child.

I pointed to the cochlea, the part shaped like an elephant trunk. I showed them where my hearing fails, explaining that the tiny hairs inside my “trunk” are simply too few and too weak to catch the sound.

“I call it the elephant trunk,” I told them.

They nodded in agreement. They didn’t look at me any differently than I thought they would. They acted normal, like this appointment was nothing unusual to them, except that everything was quiet and there were no other kids around.

Appointments like this always force me to ponder what my life would look like if I hadn’t grown up with hearing aids. A quality-of-life device, a perceived dependence tool.

I wondered if I might have remained innocent, sheltered in a single world, instead of straddling two worlds as a “worldly-wise” outsider.

Existing without my hearing aids is like plunging into freezing water. You know you have to keep moving just to stay warm, but the bitter cold never truly leaves you. Ultimately, total innocence wouldn’t change anything; the scars remain the same.

But during this visit, my mind couldn’t wander too far. My children kept me present, serving as a lovely distraction.

As the audiologist handed back my hearing aids, the familiar sounds of the room rushed back in. The heavy thoughts slowly disappeared, too.

Seeing my world through the children’s eyes reminded me that to them, I’m just Mom, hearing aids or not. To them, I’m just a Mom who loves them even though I can’t always hear them.

I remember the librarian reading it to my class. Maybe it was library day in elementary school, but I can’t recall exactly. What I do know is that it became my favorite children’s book. I haven’t read it since then, but I’ve been wanting to pick it up again, just for the fun of it.

At first, I thought my love for the book came from its adventure and survival themes. But no. What really captured me was the relationship between a young English boy named Michael and Kensuke, an elderly Japanese man living on the island.

At first, they couldn’t understand each other. While Kensuke was trying to protect Michael, the boy believed he was being held captive. Their inability to communicate became the heart of the story.

As an eleven-year-old girl, I remember thinking, There’s no way they’ll figure it out. How can they possibly understand each other?

But in the end, they did.

They found a way.

That story stayed with me because, in many ways, I lived with my own language barrier. I was the only Deaf student in my mainstream public school and the only Deaf child in my family.

As a lonely child, Kensuke’s Kingdom gave me hope. It showed me that even when two people don’t share the same language, connection is still possible.

But my own version of that connection would take years to find.

It wasn’t until after I graduated high school and went to university that I walked into my first ASL course.

My heart was pounding with a familiar, defensive anxiety. For years, classrooms had been places of intense strain. I was constantly trying to catch missed words, decipher lip movements, and piece together conversations that seemed to move just a little too quickly for me.

But the moment the instructor began to teach, the entire room shifted.

For the first time, communication didn’t feel like a chore. It didn’t feel like something I had to chase after or struggle to keep up with.

It was like a fluid, visual dance.

I watched hands shape the air, expressions carry weight, and a room full of people connect without a single spoken word.

I didn’t have to exhaustingly translate the world around me.

I just had to look.

As part of the curriculum, we were assigned to read A Journey Into the Deaf-World by Harlan Lane. He describes how the Deaf-World has no geographic borders, national flag, or physical territory, yet it has its own rich history, vibrant culture, and profound sense of home.

Reading those chapters felt like stepping off my own solitary island.

Lane described the “Deaf-World” as a transnational diaspora, a community that doesn’t need borders, soil, or a physical country to exist. Instead, their homeland is fashioned entirely out of a beautiful, shared visual language, shared history, and unique cultural spaces.

For the first time in my life, I realized that I didn’t need to force my way into a hearing world that often felt miles away, nor did I need a physical map to find my people. I guess my homeland wasn’t a place on earth; it was a distinct sense of belonging.

Over time, I’ve learned that fear can become its own kind of barrier, much like the one Michael and Kensuke faced. For much of my life, I was afraid of being misunderstood, of missing something, of never quite finding my place. But just as Michael and Kensuke eventually found a way to understand one another, I discovered that connection was possible for me, too.

Through ASL and the Deaf community, I found a new sense of familiarity, a harmony that allowed me to truly belong, not only among others, but within myself.

Maybe that’s why Kensuke’s Kingdom stayed with me for so many years. As a child, I saw two people separated by an island and a language barrier. I didn’t know then that I was seeing a small reflection of my own life.

I thought the answer was finding a way across the barrier.

Instead, I found a place where I didn’t have to cross it alone.

Naming her MeiLi was a little tongue-in-cheek. My childhood best friend was Chinese, and there was a certain playful irony in giving a cat that name. But there was also something more meaningful about it. Naming her after someone who holds a special place in my life felt like a small way of honoring that friendship.

After a few years of living with MeiLi, I started jotting down notes in my phone about the things she did that I thought humans could learn from.

Cats have a funny way of making ordinary things look important.

Take ice, for example.

During the summer, our ice machine broke, so we started freezing ice in muffin pans. Every time I broke the ice apart for my drink, MeiLi would come running, rubbing against my legs and meowing as if she were entitled to her share.

So I gave her some.

I’d drop a few pieces into her water dish, and she’d sit there watching them float. Occasionally, she’d reach out and tap one with her paw, but mostly she just watched.

Completely captivated.

One day, I decided to join her.

I put some ice in her water and sat down beside her, curious about what held her attention so completely. I watched the pieces drift around the bowl, slowly melting away.

There was something deeply meditative about it.

I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything. I was just watching.

There was no phone nearby. No music playing. Just the sound of my children playing in the background and the quiet movement of ice floating in a cat’s water bowl.

In that moment, I realized how rare it is to simply watch something exist.

It reminded me of people-watching, except there was nothing to analyze. Nothing to figure out. Nothing I needed to do.

Just watching.

And it was amazing.

I think we forget how to do that. We’re so accustomed to filling every quiet moment that even doing nothing can feel like something we need to justify.

MeiLi didn’t seem to have that problem.

She had no idea the ice was teaching me anything. She was just a cat watching ice.

And maybe that was the lesson.

Then there was the sun.

MeiLi has a talent for finding the sunniest spots in the apartment. She’ll stretch herself out in the warmth and stay there for hours, completely unconcerned with whatever else might be happening.

One day, I followed her lead.

I lay down beside her on the floor and let the sunlight warm my back. For a few minutes, I forgot about my to-do list and simply enjoyed the warmth.

I didn’t realize how much I needed that.

Cats don’t apologize for taking naps in the sun. They don’t convince themselves they’ve been lazy because they spent an afternoon resting. They don’t treat rest like something they have to earn.

Why should we?

Maybe rest doesn’t need to be productive to be worthwhile.

And then came the rain.

Whenever it rained, MeiLi would sit by the window with her eyes fixed on the droplets running down the glass. She seemed completely mesmerized by the rhythm of the world outside.

One day, I sat beside her.

Normally, I would have rushed through a rainy day. I’d look for something to clean, something to organize, something productive to accomplish indoors.

Instead, I watched the rain.

The raindrops slid slowly down the glass, each one following its own little path. MeiLi sat beside me, completely content to observe.

The rain, which I’d always thought of as an inconvenience, became something soothing.

I started to wonder how many opportunities for quiet we miss because we’re always trying to get somewhere else.

MeiLi didn’t seem particularly interested in getting anywhere.

She stopped when she wanted to stop. She rested when she was tired. She watched ice float in her water. She watched rain fall outside the window. She found the warmest patch of sunlight and stayed there as long as she pleased.

She moved at her own pace.

There was another side to this that I noticed, too.

Cats may be experts at rest, but they’re also remarkably good at knowing when they’ve had enough.

MeiLi doesn’t hesitate to hiss when someone gets too close. She’ll scratch if she feels threatened. She’ll walk away when she’s finished with your attention.

It isn’t always graceful. It isn’t always gentle. But it is clear. She knows where her boundaries are. That, too, is a form of self-care.

We often talk about self-care as if it has to look peaceful: a bath, a quiet morning, a good book, a day off. Sometimes it does. Sometimes self-care is saying no. Sometimes it’s leaving the room. Sometimes it’s protecting your space before you become so overwhelmed that all you can do is hiss.

That summer, while I was thinking about all these small moments with MeiLi, I came across Letters to a Young Therapist by Mary Pipher.

Pipher writes about the companionship pets offer us and the ways they can ground us in the present. Reading her thoughts made me think about MeiLi differently. Maybe our pets don’t just give us love and companionship. Maybe they also show us how to receive those things. MeiLi certainly doesn’t make it complicated.

MeiLi sure doesn’t make self-care complicated either. She doesn’t seem to question whether she’s allowed to rest, wander, observe, or walk away. She simply does what she needs to do.

We spend so much time trying to become better versions of ourselves. We make routines, set goals, download apps, buy planners, and search for the perfect way to take care of ourselves.

Meanwhile, the cat is asleep in the sun.

If cats could sing, I imagine MeiLi would absolutely be the diva of the apartment, belting out dramatic ballads about her love for catnip and the little flashes of reflected light from a metal knife.

I have no idea what she’d sing about.

But after all these years, I think I know what she’d tell me.

Stop rushing.

Find the sun.

Watch the rain.

Notice the ice.

And when someone gets too close, don’t be afraid to hiss.