Life Unexpected

being best friends with a guy is extremely stressful tbh.

Imagine that the Deaf community is like the Harry Potter world.

You get Deaf kids born into families where one or both parents are Deaf, there’s Deaf people going back for generations! They’ve been involved in all the schools, been on boards of organisations, they are the Purebloods.

Then there’s the muggleborns. The Deaf kids that grow up not knowing how special they are, not meeting other Deaf until they become adults or until they go to school. Some families are like the Dursleys, and seek to squash out anything that is different in their Deaf child, forbidding them to learn sign, focusing entirely on their speech, refusing to let them meet other Deaf kids, relying on hearing aids and cochlear implants alone. Other families are like the Grangers, who support anything to see their child succeed, whether that’s learning sign AND getting the cochlear implant and using hearing aids, or getting involved in the Deaf community themselves.

Then there’s the squibs. These are hearing Children Of Deaf Adults (CODA) in the Deaf world. They are completely Hearing, so miss out on actually being Deaf. They can learn sign language and be involved in the community, but like squibs aren’t really magical, hearing CODAS won’t be considered truly Deaf. Hearing CODAS can completely integrate into the Hearing world, so I suppose they don’t have the same problems that Deaf people do of being discriminated against, they usually have people assume they are completely normal (aside from being very blunt in conversation, or sometimes needing speech therapy) But then if they have kids, those kids could be Deaf!

On her childhood:

“I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed … anything that could be counted, I did.”

On her NASA calculations:

“Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start. I said, ‘Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I’ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.’ That was my forte.”

Katherine really stood out in her field because she was the only woman who asked questions.

“The women did what they were told to do,” she explained. “They didn’t ask questions or take the task any further. I asked questions; I wanted to know why.“

In 2011, when asked if she still counts things:

 “Oh, yes. And things have to be parallel. I see a picture right now that’s not parallel, so I’m going to go straighten it. Things must be in order.”