After my father died I realised how precious the adjectives are in letters of condolence. After my son was diagnosed as deaf I appreciated that hearing loops are not just token gestures to the PC brigade. Now facing redundancy I realise that it’s far better to confront the issue and offer positive words of encouragement rather than avoid mentioning it and offer only a sympathetic glance.

I feel guilty. I’m sure I have done the same in the past but the most frustrating thing in the last week has been people’s inability to make eye contact. In the same way that I found myself reassuring people after my father’s death or my son’s diagnosis, I have found myself bounding up to people reassuring them that I will be fine post redundancy.  I will. But a hug, a cheerful smile and endless flattery are doing me a lot more good than tragic glances across a crowded room.

Meanwhile the family remind me what is important. The 7 year old continued our run of good luck by coming first in breaststroke at swim club, the 10 year old has been selected to represent the school in the inter schools gala and the 19 month old took my mind off the office closure completely by having a sick bug for 6 days.

Having returned from a hectic week of conferences, film previews and networking in London it was actually quite relaxing to be forced to cancel everything and just sit holding my listless baby in my arms with Something Special on a loop for the whole weekend.

Thanks to watching Mr Tumble 24/7 his vocabulary has expanded from ‘oh oh’, ‘there’ and ‘pooh’ to include ‘helicopter’, ‘scooter’ and ‘lighthouse’.  Possibly a slight exaggeration but I’m word perfect – and can do the signs. An alternative career presenting childrens TV beckons.

It has been a good week. On Monday I was interviewed on BBC Radio Scotland and met the charming actress Gerda Stevenson, on Tuesday we heard that my 10 year old had been accepted to the school of our choice and on Thursday my 1 year old had a great audiology test which showed that his hearing is back on the moderate / severe borderline it had been pre glue ear in the Autumn. On Thursday afternoon I was made redundant.

When my bosses asked me to go to see them I naively thought they were going to offer me a pay rise. However the fact that all other senior managers were filing into the office too and the grim expressions of the founders showed it wasn’t going to be a happy chat.

We sat in stunned silence as they told us that after 35 years at the helm they have decided to close the office at the end of the year. It’s not that surprising. They are both over 60 and Random House bought 50% of the company over 7 years ago so subconciously I have probably been preparing for redundancy since then but I really hadn’t expected it now.

Some years ago I swithered over going for voluntary redundancy. I’m very glad I didn’t. Since then I have shared the excitment of developing our e-book programme, entered the fast moving world of digital marketing, travelled to Guadalajara, New York and Frankfurt and returned to my publicist roots. I’ve had a ball.

Only last week my daughter said she didn’t want me to ever leave Mainstream because I worked with such a great team. I do.  I know that I have transferable skills and am confident that when my job comes to an end at the year I’ll find something else to pay the new school fees but I’m not sure I will ever find an office where laughter is so prevalent, or where the Christmas present of choice is a saucy Santa outfit.

I’m sorry that the company is closing but I’m so happy that we had a positive audiology test and that my daughter passed her entrance exam that I cannot be too sad.  My children have proved themselves, now it’s my turn to show that I can prove myself too.

The speech therapist had been to visit him for the second time earlier in the week and I was conscious that she felt he hadn’t improved since her first visit pre Christmas. His hearing levels have gone down due to the glue ear but I have recently noticed a marked improvement in his responses, partly due to his cold getting slightly better, partly due to the volume settings on his hearing aids being ramped up to the max.

I desperately wanted him to impress her and was disappointed she felt his speech hadn’t improved but I suspect it is because my husband, with whom she had the last meeting, is a ‘cup half full’ kind of guy and as far as the deaf issue is concerned I am ‘cup half empty’. I completely understand my husbands enthusiasm but whereas with the other children I was forever claiming that I could make sense of their baby babble I am wary that if we exaggerate his achievements our deaf little boy might not get all the help he needs.

However there was no exaggeration required on Sunday night. As he enthusiastically screamed ‘there!’ and completely ruined his sisters attempts to play Hide and Seek I beamed with pride. We had friends round to celebrate my mothers birthday and the spontaneous cheering his performance elicited made him show off even more.  Perhaps all my deaf baby needs is an audience and he’ll be speaking fluently by the time he’s two.

Our 10 year old only started sleeping through the night when she began sharing a room with her sister. In an attempt to crack her sleep problems I bought every book on the subject, hired a ‘sleep doctor’ and had a researcher from a sleep clinic use her as a test case for a study so I know what I should be doing. I’m just not very good at doing it.

I dabbled with controlled crying but our first born cried so much she made herself sick and we would eventually relent. The experts advice to whisper words of reassurance was pointless as she couldn’t hear us through her own screaming. Our 18 month old can’t hear regardless so there is no point in whispering at all.

As we couldn’t follow the advice in the books we fell into all sorts of bad habits. Originally he would settle if we gave him milk so we gave him milk – at 11pm, then at 2am… then at 5am…. Latterly he wouldn’t go back into his cot and would literally wrap his limbs around us like a determined little orangutan until we relented and took him to our bed. I could have lived with that had he slept but even there he was taking longer and longer to settle with the result that since Christmas we have had to take it in turns to sleep with him so that we at least get some sleep every other night.

Detox January was manageable as we weren’t going anywhere but February marked the resumption of our social life and I realised that a dinner party wasn’t going to be a huge success if I had to go to bed when the 18 month old awoke at 11pm. Thankfully I had to go to London on business so charged my husband with the responsibility of forcing him back into the cot after his 11pm bottle and after that minor triumph decided to make him go cold turkey and venture into controlled crying territory.

It’s impossible to sleep when your baby is crying his heart out next door. My resolve very nearly weakened on numerous occasions but here we are 5 days on, the crying is less persistent, our bed is our own and the 18 month old is waking up at 7.30am with a big smile on his face.

He’s still hopeless at having a day time nap at his childminder but she claims that is because he wakes up at the slightest noise.  Our deaf baby hearing anything trumps sleep any time.

Still full of the cold he frustratingly had a really bad night and we were both fully awake from 5.30am which didn’t bode well for a good peformance at the test. He cried all the way there as I tried to plug him with a rapid succession of milk, carrot sticks and dummy as much to appease the grumpy commuters as to comfort him. However on arrival at the audiology clinic he suddenly perked up. Having been going there regularly for his whole life it must seem reassuringly familiar and he looked genuinely happy to see our Teacher of the Deaf, the Educational Audiologist and the Audiologist who were going to conduct the test.

He sat patiently while they removed his aids and did the tympanometry test which revealed both ears to be completely flat. Children with normal hearing who have similar results often require an operation to insert grommets to cure ‘glue’ ear but as it was only diagnosed two weeks ago we have to wait and see if the levels improve once his cold gets better.

To my delight he didn’t mind at all as they prodded his ears and seemed quite prepared for the audiologist to attach tubes to his ear moulds then reinsert them with crocodile clips attached to his top to stop them falling off. As he was on my knee he couldn’t see me at all but I could see his face with wires surrounding it reflected in the dark glass of the studio where the educational audiologist was playing sounds of varying levels directly into his ears. I knew the test wasn’t going well when the only sounds he was turning to were the ones which were so loud I could hear them emitting from the moulds. He was unaware he was being tested and happily watched the toys the audiologist was distracting him with until a noise prompted him to look to his right or left. The idea is that when they look round they are rewarded with a cuddly toy appearing inside a light box but my wee man kept looking round regardless of whether or not there was a noise, no doubt perplexed at the sudden appearance of a zebra / sheep / lion in the room.

I was so proud of his performance and willing the results to be better than I had hoped but when the educational audiologist emerged from the darkened room and plotted them on a graph to show us the levels he was hearing at they were dramatically lower than his best tests last summer and depressingly even lower than the bad tests two weeks previously.

At my most positive I know that the glue ear will in all likelihood clear up eventually and his hearing should return to his normal level then but at my most negative I’m aware that as long as he is profoundly deaf he’s not picking up sound in order to learn speech and we’re losing valuable time.

The audiologist tried to be positive and put volume controls on his aids so that they increase the sound levels he can pick up but when she tested with them at level 3 he wasn’t responding and she had to crank them up to the maximum.

Volume controls just add another complication into our hearing aid maintenance regime. However they do seem to be helping a bit. For the first time in weeks he is responding to our standard tests ‘hands on head’, ‘peekaboo’, ‘kisses for daddy’ so we know that when he has them in he can hear something. The problem remains that when he hasn’t got them in, in the bath, when he pulls them out during the day or first thing in the morning, he can’t hear a thing.

In all other respects he is a completely normal little boy. He’s happier than I remember any of the girls being at his age, loves playing with cars (particularly opening the log burner and putting them inside), has a particular fascination with light switches, squeals with delight when he sees his sisters, has just discovered that if he opens the oven door he can stand on it and dismantle the hob and having finally mastered walking will toddle for hours up and down the room shrieking with laughter.

I bought his first shoes last week. He was a size 6. School shoes start at 7. Had I left it any longer his first shoes would have been black Clarks lace ups. At 18 months most of his clothes are already aged 2-3 and his shoulders are so broad he’s going to make an excellent prop at rugby one day.

He really has everything going for him apart from his ears – and possibly his speech. Over the Festive period I blocked out the fact that he was deaf and just enjoyed watching him take such pleasure in all the activity – and light switches – associated with Christmas.

The January audiology tests have brought us back to earth with a bump.

Baby boys in the park

As my deaf baby I want to wrap my one year old in my arms and never let go.  As my little boy I have to face the fact that he wouldn’t stay there for two minutes and a cage might be a better option.

I’ve never been one for gender stereotyping. We dressed our first daughter in pale blue until she learned to speak and demand pink. We bought her train tracks and duplo. She hated them. Our second daughter inherited a series of hand-me-down pink dresses and barbies but I never saw her as overtly girlie. Until I had a boy.

We have lived in the same house for 7 years. The 7 year old used to bottom shuffle around the house pulling the occasional magazine off the table but never gave me the same heart-in-mouth moments that her wee brother gives me on a regular basis. The socket covers we’d bought for the first child always seemed like a marketing con. Now we’re ransacking drawers trying to find them. The 1 year olds morning ritual is to unplug my iPhone from the charger and stick the live wire into his mouth. Instead of playing with the toys inside the toy chest he climbs on top of it and bangs his hands on the glass threatening to shatter the window. Even the loo has become a climbing frame leading to unsupervised water play in the wash hand basin. I am living on nervous energy. All those hours spent at gyms and pounding the pavements are no longer necessary with my baby accelerated metabolism.

If I’m anxious at home I’m completely fraught when I’m elsewhere. At half term a 5 hour train journey from Edinburgh to Derby was one of the most stressful journeys I’ve ever experienced. I doubt even Michael Palin could ram himself into an airline seat on a packed train, unable to reach the snacks and toys brought along as distraction techniques thanks to the fat person in the next seat and find something entertaining in the experience. The only positive to be extracted was that after a couple of hours the women in front who had clearly started drinking when the train left Glasgow could no longer feel the pain when the 1 year old leaned over the seat to pull their hair.

Outwardly he is an absolute angel. Everyone comments that he is the happiest baby they have ever seen – possibly because he can’t hear the banshee he has for a mother.  At toddler group he is universally adored, the hearing aids make him seem vulnerable and cute when in fact he is anything but. It is only people who have to spend any length of time with him in enclosed spaces who understand my pain. The childminder has taken to lying her kitchen chairs on the floor before he uses them to climb on to the table and another friend, who has three children, two of whom are 3 year old twins, looked visibly relieved when we announced we were leaving first thing after an over night visit during which he trashed what she had previously thought of as a baby proofed home.

The fact that he is so obviously a fit and healthy little boy makes it all the more difficult to accept that there is something wrong with him.  I’m fine with the hearing aids but I still hate the hospital appointments.  We have the next big audiology test tomorrow morning. I’m not going. Even though the results were good last time I can’t bear the thought of him struggling against being held and failing to respond to tests because he’s crying so loudly.  I’ve also body swerved an appointment with our new speech therapist. In the summer I was buoyed by the fact that he could hear us and was responding to speech even without his hearing aids but I’m painfully aware that he’s not saying proper words yet.

I don’t really mix with parents of children the same age so was taken aback at a meeting in London earlier this week when a colleague said that her baby (born at the same time) is constantly shouting ‘park!’. I’d never even thought that our deaf baby should be at the stage of saying that.  Though it has to be said that I’ve hardly ever taken him to a park either.

Perhaps the logical solution to the vocabulary expansion and house devastation would actually be to take him to one.

I was astounded by the prevalence of union jacks in London.  Everywhere I looked there was bunting whereas in Edinburgh, though not a city rampantly in favour of independence, it is only the occasional shop window that has an apologetic display dedicated to all things British. At St Pancras the girls were excited to see the Olympic rings suspended from the ceiling and even Marks and Spencer at Kings Cross had the All English range of sandwiches including Coronation Chicken and Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pud which I hadn’t spotted in their Scottish counterpart. In anticipation of the Jubilee, and presumably the Olympics, we had a note home from Brownies asking us to teach our children the National Anthem. As it was one of the first things I ever learned to blast out on a recorder at school (spit firing out the end) I was surprised that our children had got to the ripe old ages of 10 and 7 without learning it but as the anthem is generally only sung at sporting events which they watch with saltires painted on their faces I suppose it makes sense that they’re word perfect at the Flower of Scotland and clueless about the English equivalent.

We returned from London on Monday, a Bank Holiday here though nowhere else (interestingly the children only get one day off school for the Jubilee) and the children were still off school on the Tuesday. Perfect timing as it was my birthday. Twenty years ago I recall celebrating my birthday with a wild party in the garden of my London flat with free flowing Pimms and very little food. Ten years on I was pregnant with my first baby but still attempted to go out for a meal with a crowd of friends and pretend I hadn’t lost my party spirit. This year, increasingly unimpressed by my advancing years, I was quite happy to celebrate alone in the garden with the children.  I spent the day listening to one of our authors, Martin Spinelli, being interviewed on radio and TV. The subject of his book, After the Crash, resonates deeply with me. Like my father his wife was killed in a car crash but his young son was in the car with her and Martin barely had time to grieve as all his energy was directed at willing his little boy to recover.  Thankfully he did and Martin said in his many interviews that whereas before the accident, when he apparently he had everything, he was still dissatisfied with life, post accident he has realised that being a good father is more important than anything else.

It was ironic that as I listened to the various interviews and nodded sagely in agreement I was ignoring my own children. Though not as ironic as the phone in on one of the daytime programmes he was on which was on the subject of parents use of phones and computers being tantamount to child neglect.  I felt even more guilty then laughed as I heard the presenters urge parents to send in their thoughts by email, text or twitter or call them – no doubt with neglected children sitting in a high chair or crawling around their feet.

In fact I had a lovely birthday with my children.  The older one lay on her tummy in the garden reading magazines, the younger one cleaned out a water play tray for the baby to play with and he commando rolled around the garden, possibly in silence, certainly in suburbia, but clearly very happy.

In the last four weeks I’ve seen our Teacher of the Deaf, our Speech Therapist, visited hospital to pick up temporary hearing aids (our 9 month old baby had chewed his other ones), visited hospital to get new hearing moulds, visited hospital to get more temporary hearing aids (he chewed the replacement ones!) and spent the last two Saturdays at sign language classes organised by the National Deaf Childrens Society but no one has mentioned it at all.

There is always the possibility that we were informed about it at the Sign Language Classes and I simply didn’t understand. But I don’t think so. The chat after only two weeks is limited: ‘My name is..what’s your name?’, ‘I’m fine, how are you’ and to my utter horror sharing with the entire class how old we are. In spite of that mild horror I’m really enjoying the Sign Language Classes. Unlike the weekend for newly diagnosed deaf parents which we was populated by parents of deaf babies who were as shocked and upset as we were, the Sign Language Classes are attended by parents of 5-16 year olds who have had time to come to terms with their diagnosis. It’s such a relief to see that their children are just normal children. Shy little girls, sullen teenagers, exhibitionists, the same sort of kids you’d get in a cross section of children who weren’t deaf.  They’re probably more bemused by me. I go along with my six year old who hasn’t got a hearing problem at all and our amazing childminder who gives up her Saturday mornings and time with her own family to learn sign language to communicate with mine.

It’s strangely liberating being in a class for two hours where no one speaks at all. The charming teacher told us by writing on the board that Sign Language is his first language and and since then has communicated only by tapping out the alphabet on his fingers and using gestures. In any group situation I’m normally the class clown but deprived of the ability to speak I’m sitting back and soaking up the experience. I’m also loving the opportunity to bond with my six year old child every Saturday morning.

When our baby was diagnosed I worried about the effect it would have on the family, particularly that as the middle child our six year old would suffer. I would never have thought that our baby being deaf would bring us closer together. But it has.

I would still give anything for the deaf diagnosis to be a terrible mistake. I still cry whenever I think what it might mean for my baby. But on a day to day level life is not that bad. He doesn’t know any different and with the support of the various charities and our amazing friends and family we can see a bright future. Who would ever have thought that Sign Language Classes would be one of the highlights of my social calendar?!

I have included ‘silence’ in the blog title to reflect the fact that our baby boy is deaf. There is no getting away from ‘the deaf issue’ but now that I have the freedom to write about what I want, when I want I can again include the ridiculous antics of our six year old daughter (who worrying embraces all things chav) and the tentative steps our nine year old daughter is taking towards adolescence (asked to her first school disco last week) which make me laugh and cry in equal measure.

Since January we have had our baby baptised on the Island of Islay, I have returned to work, I have abandoned my family to go on business trips to London, we have spent a weekend with the parents of other newly diagnosed deaf children in Ayr and I have taken the girls to see X Factor Live in Glasgow. Of those the most relaxing, ironically, has been returning to work and the most frightening, not the deaf weekend but taking the underground train from Glasgow Central to the SECC surrounded by ravaging hordes of X Factor fans.

The ‘deaf issue’ impacts on our lives but it doesn’t define it.

We were overwhelmed by cards from friends and relatives, the most moving of which was from a business colleague in Holland who said she had lit a candle for our daughter in a beautiful church in Amsterdam.  Thereafter, whenever I went on a business trip I made a point of seeking out a church to light a candle for our little girl. It was in a cathedral in Frankfurt that I had the realisation that I could probably get the same solace were I to go to church at home and from then on I started going to church on a regular basis.

Both my girls were baptised in Islay, a beautiful island on the West Coast of Scotland where my own name is on the cradle roll.  We will do the same with our baby boy but I wanted to do something at home to celebrate his birth in our own church, as to be honest, he could do with all the prayers he can get.  It seemed appropriate to arrange the Blessing for the anniversary of when we lost the baby which by coincidence is the same date I found out I was pregnant last Christmas.

I thought we could cancel out the negative emotions with positive ones but going into church and seeing her name in the Book of Rememberance, I was choked and bitterly regretted putting mascara on my bottom lashes.  It wasn’t helped by the fact that in attempting to downplay the occasion, my husband’s family were up en masse but none of my family were there at all, apart from a second cousin who I clung to, grateful that I had at least one blood relation in the congregation. Thankfully I was able to pull myself together and smiled proudly as our nine and six year old girls were invited to light the advent candles, and even managed to sing the Blessing when we stood at the front, as the minister carried our baby around the church.  The only moment I faltered was when he held our deaf baby boy and said, ‘May you Hear the voice of God ringing clear for you every day’. Tears welled in my eyes and those of most of the congregation.

I know it is fashionable to condemn religion.  I know it causes as many problems as it solves.

But I really need to have faith that my baby girl is in heaven and that my prayers that my baby boy will grow up to be able to hear and speak will be answered.

It is difficult going into a new environment where other mothers must notice his hearing aids immediately but pointedly don’t mention them.  I’m also aware that he’s a very big baby, weighing at 4 months what most babies weigh at 6.  I’m sure that on seeing that he’s deaf they assume a greater problem when he looks as though he’s big enough to roll over, clap hands and sit up and is instead lying floppily in my arms sucking a dummy.  I’m tempted to get a T shirt printed for him saying ‘I’m just a normal baby who happens to be deaf’.

I must have been a terrible pupil at school.  In all the classes, I find myself being the joker.  Camouflaging my anxiety with quips about the buzzing of his hearing aids sounding like the tardis, or getting the sign language so wrong at baby sensory that I’m probably swearing at him. The classes are lovely but it is difficult to take some of the activities seriously.  At one class, we were asked to pass a textured snake around the circle, I thought they were suggesting we pass our babies around like some complicated Scottish reel.  Another time we had to hold our babies over some balls and get them to kick them around reminiscent of some life-size game of table football.

Friends are amused that after years blagging my way onto guest lists at parties and music festivals I’ve now managed to blag my way into our local mother and toddler group. Run by lovely ladies who provide coffee and home baking each week, it is one of the hottest tickets in town. People allegedly put their names down at the moment of conception. I didn’t put mine down at all but our child minder put my baby down when he was first born and a friend put my name down when she was registering her own son.  Neither of them have yet made it to the top of the list but on seeing my name, one of the lovely ladies visited me at home offering to fast track us to the top of the list as she thought it would stimulate him. Who would have thought that being deaf would have its advantages?!

Suddenly I find myself on the receiving end of charity and my opinion has changed.

On the day my baby boy was diagnosed as being deaf I rang the number for the National Deaf Children’s Society to request a leaflet which had been offered on the hand out given to me by the hospital.  Expecting a drone in a call centre or a recorded message, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself chatting to a charming young woman, full of empathy and advice.  Having accepted the numerous leaflets she offered, I immediately assumed that her query regarding whether I wanted to become a member was a subtle way of asking for a monthly direct debit.  In fact she was not asking me for something, she was offering me something.

Since then I have joined the parents forum of the NDCS where complete strangers have shared their experiences and offered advice.  I have signed up for a weekend for recently diagnosed parents to meet other deaf children and their families where the charity covers the cost of our family of five staying at a hotel on the West Coast.  In addition I have received an endless stream of information booklets and DVDs, been invited to a family Christmas party and been given the number of a family liaison officer who will answer any questions and help fill in forms for any benefits we might be entitled to.  It’s a whole new world.

When I announced on Facebook that Angus was deaf numerous friends left much appreciated messages of support but one in particular made me stop and think.  It was from a colleague of my husband’s who wrote that she had been stopped by someone raising money for NDCS as she left the supermarket and having just heard our news had signed up for a monthly direct debit.  It was such a generous thing to do and I was ashamed that before I actually needed a charity I would have walked straight by mumbling that I give to various charities and don’t want to commit to one.

I still think that a regular contribution to one charity is a lot to ask of people but for those who do succumb to the cold callers and good looking tabard wearers, let me tell you the recipients – whatever the charity may be – genuinely appreciate it.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what he can hear with them in. The intention is to enhance his hearing to enable him to hear speech but having convinced myself (wrongly) that he could hear me before the diagnosis, I’m nervous to assume he can hear me now. If he can, he’ll be shocked that the beatific mother who he thought took his sisters to school every morning is in fact a screaming banshee.

He can definitely hear loud noises. He’s always been very good at napping on the hoof but now he wakes up as soon as a loud bus trundles past, and in the playground he cried the first time he heard the school bell. The fact that we have to take the aids out at night means that he still isn’t woken by my husband stumbling around in the middle of the night or the girls bounding in in the morning, but I’m painfully aware that when he wakes for his 4 am feed he can’t hear me soothing him back to sleep again.

I can’t believe it’s only 3 weeks.  The first week we were in total shock, unable to eat or sleep and torturing ourselves worrying about his future; the second week we started gathering information and making plans for dealing with the present, and now it honestly seems relatively normal. If it’s possible, I love him more than I loved him before – I think everyone does. I desperately hope that the hearing aids are working so that speech isn’t a problem but even if they aren’t and it is, we’ll love him to bits and do everything we possibly can to look after him.

I’ve been astonished by the speed with which the NHS have moved since the official diagnosis. Admittedly, I hated the original audiologist for delivering the news that our baby was deaf but by the time we saw the paediatrician, we were just grateful for someone who could answer all our questions and reassure us.  Since then we have seen another audiologist who took the moulds and another who showed us how to fit the hearing aids. A teacher for the deaf sat in on that appointment and is coming to our home this week with a teacher who will be assigned to us permanently.  Given that I’ve never been very good at hot-housing my children to ensure they reach their milestones, this baby could be beating them to it with such one-to-one care.

My bionic baby is going to be just fine and looking on the bright side, he’ll probably be the only baby not to be woken up by the fireworks this Bonfire Night.

When you need to learn, your brain is like a sponge.  At our pediatrician appointment yesterday, the consultant actually took my husband to be a research scientist and looked astounded when he professed to working in the marketing department of a national newspaper.  In the past, the educational pull outs he has created to increase circulation have been largely based on history and geography – famous battles, Scottish castles, the highest mountains and international flags – but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if readers open their papers to find a poster of the inner ear complete with details of the latest research into cochlear implants at the breakfast table.

If only our children could be encouraged to learn with the same zeal. But no matter how much you try to explain to a 9-year-old that life will be much easier if she memorizes her times tables now, she can’t comprehend a world in which maths (other than that necessary to work out if she has the budget to buy a ‘slushy’ at the gym or the latest Jacqueline Wilson book) is important.   I wish someone had drummed it into me. When I was a child, I gave up maths as soon as possible, veering towards all things arts related – my A levels, my degree, my career in publishing. Then suddenly out of left field, it came back to haunt me. Obviously at a certain level in any career, you’re going to find yourself managing a budget, but even if you don’t work, managing the family budget is the most challenging of all as outgoings escalate and income worryingly stagnates.

Far from encouraging an interest in science, our deaf diagnosis has pretty much passed the girls by. I’m delighted that they don’t share our devastation but it can be difficult to take their more petty concerns seriously in comparison.  As I was at the hospital with the baby all afternoon yesterday, the two grannies had to take the girls to their hair appointment.  I returned, shell-shocked, having discovered the diagnosis was worse than initially feared, to find the girls in tears. I assumed it was empathy. It wasn’t. Their tears were for their long straggly hair which ‘will never ever grow back’.  It will.  The hairs in their baby brother’s inner ear won’t.

Time I think for a basic biology lesson…

Last week my biggest anxiety was not fitting into a specific parental group, now I do – but it is not one which I ever envisaged I would be joining.  My outwardly perfect 10-week-old baby boy has been diagnosed with a severe hearing problem.  He will be fitted with hearing aids in the next few weeks and have to wear them for the rest of his life.

When the audiologist told me he was deaf, I sat in stunned disbelief. I’d gone to the appointment convinced the reason he hadn’t passed the previous test was because he had a cold, not for one minute anticipating a diagnosis there and then. Emerging from the hospital trying to comprehend the enormity of what I had been told, I sat on the bus clutching my baby to my chest, tears dripping down my cheeks and read the leaflet ‘Your Baby Has a Hearing Loss’ which gave the number of a charity to call for further information.  On calling them I suddenly realised that I had been transformed from being the person who donates or raises money for charity to being a recipient.

My husband rushed home.  Not, as I initially thought, to support me but because he was in profound shock too.  As the days have gone by, unable to eat or sleep, I have tried to come to terms with it by talking to friends, professionals and people in similar situations but his grief is visible and hard to bear.  The dreams he might have had for his first son have been shattered and as we pick up the pieces, I have been trying to reassure him.

We’re so lucky that our 6-year-old has a deaf boy in her class.  He is a gorgeous, popular, bright little boy who she invited to her birthday party.  To have a role model for us all to look to is fantastic and I immediately sought out his mother who has helped to fill in the huge gaps about what life is like for the hearing impaired.  The fact that the school has children with hearing problems reassures me that my son will be able to enter mainstream education and our wonderful child-minder – whom I first feared might not even be able to look after a baby officially labelled as handicapped – has reassured me that not only can she still look after him but that she has already looked into sign language classes and will learn it so that she can communicate with him even when he‘s not wearing his hearing aids.

My initial reaction was to stop going out, give up work, wrap him in cotton wool and devote my life to caring for my baby but I’ve begun to realise that for him to stand any chance of a normal life, I need to treat him as normally as possible.  He’s so lucky to have two big sisters who now see him as even more special and we’re fortunate to have wonderful friends and family, all of whom have been immensely supportive.  This week started with the tragic clichés but ends with the positive ones. It’s at times like this you know who your friends are, there is always someone worse off than you and things can only get better.  We’ll all get through this.

It was a baptism by fire on the first day as the school run (in our house the term run is used literally) was followed by a 10 am appointment at the audiology department for the baby’s second hearing test and a 3 pm appointment with a physiotherapist to have his hips checked.  He’d failed both tests in hospital but it was unfortunate that both appointments came through for the same day entailing two long bus rides across the city with only a brief return to the house for lunch, feed and nappy change before we headed out again.

Thank goodness for the sling.  He appears to hate the gorgeous Bugaboo Pram and screams his head off whenever I lay him in it and prance off to school trying to look like the yummiest of mummies. But as soon as I pop him into the back breaking Baby Bjorn sling (he gained another 13 oz this week) he nods off and does a very good impression of a contented baby.

Both girls had failed their first hearing tests in hospital so I wasn’t worried about the second audiology test, assuming that like them he’d pass with flying colours and it would be the last we heard about it.  Unfortunately it wasn’t.  He failed again so is being referred back to hospital for more detailed tests in a couple of weeks.  I’m trying desperately not to Google ‘hearing loss in babies’ as I know I’ll anticipate the worst and after Googling ‘placenta praevia’ when I had that, realise that there is a tendency for people to record only their dramatic experiences rather than their positive ones.

Thankfully he passed the physiotherapy test and I was so proud of achieving school drop off and two hospital appointments on time that I went one step further and popped into the office to introduce him to my colleagues.  It’s a long time since I’ve done the standing in reception surrounded by everyone cooing and it felt good to be cooed at rather than doing the cooing for once.  I think I fooled everyone into thinking that third time round, this baby lark is a doddle.  Little do they know the anxiety and sleep deprivation concealed by a blow-dry, mascara and an industrial sized vat of touche éclat.