The Challenge I Live With and Want to Share With You

By Sally Roesch Wagner, Ph.D.

My whole life I prided myself with being healthy as a horse. And then the 1960s warnings we scoffed at about standing too close to the huge speakers during rock concerts came true. I remember in particular doing this at a Jefferson Airplane concert. 

I did lose much of my hearing once I began to age. So now I am reduced to “what?”s and lip-reading and the worst is feeling alone in groups. 

I imagine from the outside I look like a stick-in-the-mud because I don’t laugh when everyone else does. From the inside it feels like I’m separate, alone, pushed aside. The best jokes, it turns out, are those that people almost mumble under their breath, as an aside. 

I find myself exhausted sometimes after spending time with a friend who speaks softly, tired from the strain of trying to understand them. Ever notice how older people in a gathering will sometimes just sit smiling quietly? I used to think they were starting to lose it. Now I know the only thing we have lost is our hearing.  

My life feels like it’s closing around me. I went to a musical on Broadway recently and, while they were nearly yelling from the stage, I couldn’t understand much of what the performers said. And it was “Suffs,” about the women’s suffrage movement, the area of study for all of my life. 

I love teaching, and at 82 I feel I’m at the top of my game. Student evaluations show they seem to feel the same. But I may have to stop teaching because I can’t hear about a quarter of the 18 students in the seminar—young white women mostly, still culturally trained to use soft, inside voices. I find I am avoiding large groups. 

I don’t have a solution and I wish I did. I pushed my budget to get the best hearing aids available, but they have a limited ability. I don’t feel like I can expect everyone I encounter to speak loud enough for me to hear, nor practice doing a “mic check” each time, loudly repeating everything said in a group. I remember now with regret how frustrated I got when hearing-challenged acquaintances kept asking me to repeat what they’d said. 

I do feel like something is lost when older adults are put into what feels like isolation chambers due to our hearing ability. We have something unique to contribute from the perspective of our years, and I would like us to find a way as a society to allow us to do that.   

While this is a new situation for me, I think of the terrible loss from the long history of the separation of the hearing abled and the hearing challenged. I know I am new to this issue and others have a long history of working with it. 

My finally understanding and writing about it so late in life may anger them. But I would like now to be part of the ongoing work to find a way culturally to change hearing challenges from an individual problem to a collective solution.

Author and professor Sally Roesch Wagner, Ph.D., was awarded one of the first doctorates in the U.S. for work in women’s studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, and was a founder of one the first college-level women’s studies programs in the U.S., at California State University, Sacramento. She has taught women’s studies courses for 53 years, currently in Syracuse University’s Honors Program. A major historian of the suffrage movement, she was the founding director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation and sits on the advisory councils of the Women’s Suffrage National Monument and the National Women’s History Museum. For more, see sallyroeschwagner.com. Special thanks to contributor Bob Liff for pointing Dr. Wagner to HHF.

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