Midwife, Mother, Me

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If you know I’m a wee bit deaf…

midwife.mother.me.

Listen up, I will say this only once!

If you know this about me, it makes you one of the few people I have trusted enough to tell. Or perhaps you are one of my loyal readers who read a previous post (https://midwifemotherme.com/2025/10/06/of-sight-and-sound/) Although I guess there may be some who have long suspected it but were too polite to say. I wouldn’t know.

If you know this about me, we probably live together. I’m looking at you, kiddos!

Here’s what everybody needs to know about us ear-challenged people:

We know you are talking. We just can’t make out the words. We are sorry about that.

We might not be wearing our hearing aids, we are sorry about that.

But:  Hearing aids aren’t magic. Think of it like this: they are tiny microphones. They make things louder but not clearer. Imagine a photo. Imagine that picture is blurred. No matter how much you zoom in, you cannot obtain more detail. Or it’s like a bad phone line, or a bad recording for your listening language exam. Extra volume is helpful but it doesn’t restore sound quality.

Remember that when you talk to us, we don’t want to make you repeat yourself all the time. Look, every time you mumble something quietly from behind us or too far away, we do know you are talking. We’re just not sure if you’re talking to us. Or if what you said required a response. Because you were unintentionally unintelligible. We now need to guess whether it was important enough to get you to repeat, or if it was a comment about the weather which can probably be ignored. We’re kinda hoping you’ll remember we’re a wee bit deaf. We’re assuming that if it were important, you’d make sure we could see your face, you’d speak a touch louder, and enunciate. Then we don’t have to guess, and you won’t have to repeat. Or wonder if  we’re ignoring you.

We aren’t ignoring you. We just don’t want to sound like great auntie Mildred, constantly asking you to SPEAK UP DEAR… we use soooo much energy trying to guess what you might have said: we’re gauging your posture, your facial expression, your body language, we’re probably doing a bit of lipreading (that’s assuming you are facing us and close enough) so that we can give you the appropriate response without begging your pardon for the umpteenth time. We can’t do any of this if we cannot see you. Our eyes are now doing a great deal of the hearing. We literally no longer care if you talk behind our back because we aren’t offended by what we can’t hear.

But we’d hate for you to think we aren’t interested in what you’re saying. We care. That’s why we got the sodding hearing aids. Which make everything noisier. We know we should suck up the extra decibels and make peace with the crackling sound of wind in our hair, the extra blaring of sirens, the augmented vrumm of traffic just so we might catch a few more fragments of what you’re saying.  We don’t know what’s more tiring: increasing life’s volume with the aids or concentrating extra hard on what you’re saying without them. Remember that usually we’re doing both. Either way, we’re really really trying.

If we’re at work, we might not want to advertise that our hearing is a bit meh. That’s why we are more likely to wear our pesky aids. Neither our colleagues nor our clients need to know, and we work extra hard to make sure they are heard. We know we can’t possibly guess what they are going to say so we make unbelievable effort to tune in, stand close, watch their faces. It isn’t easy but what choice do we have? It doesn’t escape us that the effort we make for people we don’t necessarily know all that well does seem disproportionate compared to the effort we make for our loved ones. We are so sorry about that.

But look: when I’m at home with my grown/nearly grown kids I, for one, know that I sound like a broken record. I also know that anything I say is unlikely to be heard. The kids are most likely listening to music via their (very discrete) airpods. If I need them to really hear something, I make sure I have their full attention. I may need to send a text. Full of boring instructions about stuff they already know but have repeatedly ignored (https://midwifemotherme.com/2024/06/23/never-stop-nagging/). I have been doing this for years. For people who’s hearing is sodding 100%. These are the people who know I’m a wee bit hard of hearing, but who complain when their muffled mumbling about stuff (probably severe hunger despite a full fridge, or poverty despite allowance) gets processed by me as unworthy of repetition.  I genuinely didn’t hear what you said. But also, I ran out of fucks. It’ll look a lot like I’m ignoring you. Both things can be true! If you have something new to say, get closer, face me and sodding speak up. I swear I won’t be offended even if my aids are in. They help. But I’m still a wee bit deaf, please don’t expect miracles. Please don’t be offended.

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2 responses to “If you know I’m a wee bit deaf…”

  1. Bob Lynn avatar
    Bob Lynn

    Dear Claire,

    You have laid out a neat acoustic paradox: hearing aids amplify volume without restoring clarity, turning speech into a blurred photograph that demands immense visual and cognitive effort to decipher. What is fascinating is how this sensory filter behaves depending on the environment.

    On the labour ward, you willingly spend that high cognitive currency. You step in close, track micro-expressions, and piece together fractured sounds because the clinical stakes demand precision. At home, however, you have identified a different equilibrium. When the kids mumble from behind a doorway with AirPods firmly wedged in their ears, you treat the muffled acoustic signal as low-priority background noise and let it go.

    Looking back at your thoughts on the machinery of nagging, you argued that nagging is essentially an act of stubborn optimism, the persistent belief that repeating an instruction will eventually turn reluctant bystanders into reliable teammates. Yet, as you noted when wrestling with glasses and hearing tests, admitting sensory decline often feels like conceding defeat to the inevitable.

    If nagging assumes the listener can hear but simply chooses not to act, while your domestic selective deafness assumes the speaker is talking without saying anything vital, both sides have effectively rationalised their inattention. You conserve your energy because the domestic stakes rarely justify the exhausting effort of lipreading and decoding, and they don’t bother to enunciate because they assume you will step in anyway if something actually catches fire.

    This raises an interesting logical dilemma about the domestic economy of attention. If your auditory filter at home operates less as a physical handicap and more as an unintentional boundary against the never-ending mental load, does demanding that your family face you and enunciate actually fix the communication deficit, or does it simply force them to take real ownership of what they want to say?

    Best wishes,

    Bob

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  2. David avatar
    David

    I can so relate. For me, being a “Lazy Listener” as a kid in the 1960s, sitting at the front of the class, lip reading and deducing class material from the 30% I actually heard was just the norm. My hearing improved to just below normal after an operation when I was 13, but I still had, and still have, great trouble picking a conversation out of a noisy room. University lectures were an absolute pain because the lecturers kept repeating and re-phrasing the points they were making, and I, now hearing more clearly, got so bored listening the same thing over and over. Luckily, being a sigma male type, I rarely get into noisy environments now and prefer solitary peace to trying to ‘socialise’.

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