Hard of Herring

I am sick. My nose has been stuffed for about a month now (no kidding) and now my ears are blocked. Each time I go for nose drops I feel guilty. How many of those little plastic bottles am I going to use? Why don't they have an economy size for nose drops? I know you aren't suppose to use nose drops for too long but I weighed the option of not using them and the option of not breathing until the cold abates...guess what I chose. It is suppose to be hot here in the Sahara but not this winter. We really had a true winter...okay it didn't go down below freezing more than....well never but it is cold for us warm weather light weights.

Having my ears all stuffed up makes me think a bit about my oldest who is profoundly deaf and yet functions quite well armed with a hearing aid and a cochlear implant. The part for me that is hard to grasp is that even if intellectually he knows he is deaf, he doesn't really know what it feels like to be deaf. Sure every so often you might here him say something like, "Well I don't hear so well do I?", but that could be any teenager talking to his parent. When he was younger, before he had the implant and before he "grew up" he would often wake up in the morning, especially Shabbat morning, before anyone else. I don't really know why he did this, I used to say that he was more affected by the morning light than the rest of us, but that was a shot in the dark (ha ha). My son likes to do things and likes to be involved with something. Especially on the Sabbath he has learned the art of curling up on the sofa and enjoying a good book with a sidecar of hot tea and a bowl of Cheerios and ice cold milk. God bless him.

What I don't understand is why he doesn't put his hearing aid in when he first gets up in the morning. I would go nuts if I didn't hear anything. Like having my ears or nose blocked...I grab the drops and ease the congestion. I would reach for my hearing aid and then probably my teeth when I woke up. If my son never heard in his life, I would understand it. You can't miss something you never had to begin with right? But he has heard and he can hear, so why isn't his first morning impulse to go and put in his hearing aid? Even more so because when someone else gets up he might start a conversation with them. A rather one sided conversation which I find rather clever of him. So it isn't because he wants to shut himself off from the outside world, which is totally something I would do if I had a hearing aid and wanted to escape the big bad world. Okay, you caught me. There would be times I would want to hear and there would be times I would elect to shut down.

This question troubled me for awhile until I was speaking with a friend of mine who has some trouble seeing in the mornings. He uses a hair dryer to dry his eyes and only then can he fully function. He was describing how, on a non-work day, he would wake up and not bother with the normal ritual and deferred to other things before having to "get sighted". Now he wasn't not using electricity for purely halachic reasons nor was he being irresponsible; perhaps a bit lazy but the choice was intentional. One day a week, and not really a whole day, just a few morning moments that he could pigeon hole the routine and be himself for himself with no one else letting him know he is different. Perhaps for my son that is the way he feels too. When he would get up early in the morning and the only one awake was him, he could set the rules of what is reality. What is normal.

Now my son is much older and if he wakes at all in the morning it is to grab a bowl of cereal and to climb back into bed. Now that sounds like a plan to emulate.

Shabbat Shalom