Title: Finding Zoe: A Deaf Woman’s Story of Identity, Love, and
Adoption
Author: Brandi Rarus
Publisher: BenBella Books
Pages: 320
Genre: Biography/Autobiography/Personal Memoir
Format: Hardcover
Purchase at AMAZON
In Finding Zoe, Brandi Rarus
shares the story of her very personal path of self-discovery and the struggle
of being caught between two worlds—the hearing and the Deaf. We travel with her
through her mainstreamed younger years and later on to college at The National
Technical Institute for the Deaf where she embraces Deaf culture and realizes
that being Deaf is not a handicap, but a passport to a whole new and exciting
world.
Brandi brings us behind the scenes as she takes on the world advocating
for her Deaf Community as Miss Deaf America; meeting and falling in love with
Tim, a Gallaudet University student leader who
later helped write the landmark Americans with Disability Act on Capitol Hill.
The two married and had three hearing boys—the first non-deaf children born in
Tim’s family in 125 years, but with all their blessings something was still
missing.
With a powerful foreword provided by Marlee Matlin, an Academy
Award-winning actress and member of the National Association of the Deaf,
Finding Zoe is an inspiring recollection of how two individuals who, already
bonded by their diversity, come together as an unbreakable mother-daughter pair
to navigate a silent world and shed light the adoption/foster care system.
Book Excerpt:
We waited to have kids for three years, and then I
didn’t conceive for another
three. By then, we
were both more than ready. I was hoping for a girl. Throughout
my life, I had just always assumed that I’d have a daughter. When I was young, I never dreamt about my wedding day, but I did dream about my daughter.
Tim also wanted to have a daughter; he’d longed to have children.
Because of his parents
divorcing when he was young,
Tim has always wanted to be the kind of hands-on father he had never had. We were both overjoyed when
Blake finally entered the world. And we felt the same when Chase followed.
When I became
pregnant the third time,
I just felt inside that it was another
boy. Tim, wanting to be positive,
sent me a card that said, “Congratulations, babe, on the birth of our daughter.” I knew that the card was an expres-
sion of his love, and I really appreciated it, but I
just knew that it was wrong. Still, I never prayed for a girl—I didn’t believe in messing with fate—I just prayed that I would be happy
either way.
When I delivered Austin in August of
2002, I felt joy as I held my little darling tight. I wanted no baby other than
him. But I will never forget the look on Tim’s face when he saw
that brown-haired little boy. I think
that for a moment he was afraid that I would be disappointed. But he quickly
realized that I was more than just okay. Nevertheless, later
that day he said to me, “Let’s go to China.”
We had talked about adopting
a baby girl from China when we first married back in 1991, and I loved that he
wanted to continue
to expand our family.
Early on in our marriage, Tim would tell me the story of our future
deaf daughter, saying
that she would look and
act exactly like me. “She’ll be blonde with two pig-
tails, wear a red dress and black shoes, and carry a black
purse,” he’d say, grinning. “And she’ll have a strong person- ality. She’ll think that she runs the house!
She’ll be classy,
smart, and stylish.” He also said that she’d look just like the Coppertone baby from the television commercial—the
little girl who looks back while
a cute puppy pulls at her bathing suit, revealing her adorable, little
white butt.
I laughed and I believed him, not only because
he was describing my reason for being, but also because I
was always so blown away by Tim’s ability to tell stories—they
were always
so graphic, visual,
and funny. I’ve always
been
fascinated by ASL and, in particular,
Tim’s
ASL, how he
just paints a picture. It’s similar to when a hearing person reads a story to a child and the tone of their voice just cap-
tures them. Tim made our future daughter seem so real, so alive, that I could practically reach out and touch her.
When Blake was born in 1997, Tim was beside himself with joy. I was sitting
in the hospital bed still exhausted from giving birth, and Tim was sitting in the chair
next to me. The nurse did the BAER hearing test to check Blake’s
hearing right in the room when he was born, and he passed
instantly. She jumped for joy, while Tim, my mother, and
I just stared at her. Looking back, I think
that
she had never been in that situation before
and realized that she
might have made us feel
a little uncomfortable because when she left the room, she never came back.
Having a hearing child, now that was news. I was thrilled
for Blake. I wanted him to have the world at his finger- tips.
But had he been born deaf, I would have been just
fine with it. But I thought that Tim was going to faint—not
because he was upset that Blake was hearing but from the
shock of it.
For Tim, finding out that his child was hearing was probably just as shocking
as when hearing parents find out that
their child is
deaf. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. The genetic counselor we
saw when we
first started dating told us that we had a 50 percent chance of having
hearing children, so Tim knew that there was a defi-
nite possibility. Even though he had many hearing friends by
then, including some of his best friends, I think that growing up in a family that was so steeped in Deaf Culture
and
in the Deaf community made the situation impossible
for him to even
imagine. It just did not compute. And there was little Blake all wrapped up in his hospital
blanket, the
first hearing child born into his family in well over a century.
For a split second, he wondered how on earth he’d raise
a hearing child who would go to public school. He worried
how he would communicate with Blake’s hearing friends because he wouldn’t be able to talk with them. What would
happen at Blake’s birthday parties since Blake’s friends and
their parents wouldn’t know how to sign? These were all
just passing thoughts—gone in a few seconds. After he was
over
the initial shock, the adjustment felt on par with hav-
ing to buy blue clothes
and trucks instead of pink clothes
and dolls. Blake would just have to learn how to sign.
Tim had to make some changes, however, now that we
had a hearing child.
For example, he had to learn the cor-
rect volume for electronics.
I remember once before when a
few of his hearing friends had come over to watch a base- ball
game, they told him that he’d turned the volume on the
television up so high that it made the entire house shake.
Living with deaf people his whole life, he had no reason
to
be aware of the intricacies of sound. He would turn on
the car radio and sort of dance to the beat, only to find out from a hearing friend that he was dancing to a talk show.
When each of the kids was born, we turned
on the tele- vision
for audio stimulation and also played mood music on
a boom box to help them fall asleep. My family
gave us Beethoven, Mozart, and country music CDs, and told us to turn the volume on the boom box up to five. I, too, needed to be reminded
about when I made noise—whether it was turning on the television, closing the cabinets, or with my voice, even—and to be quieter. I had forgotten.
