I have a hearing impairment. Apparently it’s hereditary passed between mothers and daughters, which delighted my daughters when I told them. This particular impairment usually develops after you’ve had a baby and by the time your child is around eleven, you start to notice it affecting your daily life. I am sceptical about that last bit. I wonder if it really is that as your life is pretty much screaming and crying from the moment you give birth (either you or the baby) that until everyone starts to pipe down around the time that they go to secondary school, you don’t actually notice. So I noticed at around the twelve year post-baby mark when I was lying in bed one morning and thought the motorway was unusually quiet. I lifted my head up and it transpired that the motorway was not unusually quiet, my ear wasn’t working properly. And after various pokings and proddings I know now that it will never ever work properly again.
If I lose my good ear – wind blowing in it, the cadence of a voice on the edge of the range of both of my ears or the classic for everyone who notices something wrong with their hearing, lots of background noise -I can’t hear anything. There’s a lot I can miss. After the poking and proddings to establish that my ear was/is a dud (I can’t even blame it on getting older), my tempting options were to have a hearing aid or to have an operation. The operation involves me being kept awake whilst my ear is cut open and its entire contents removed. A hole could then be drilled through the bone, a ring put in the gap and it all bundled back in. All the while, polite conversation would be made with me to monitor my hearing. The risks with said operation included losing the hearing in that ear entirely or half of my face dropping. I didn’t fancy losing what little hearing I do have and frankly I don’t need any help in looking less attractive. So I went for the hearing aid. And it does help.
Last week I managed to have lunch with my friends. This should not be a difficult or surprising thing to do. Nevertheless it has proved to be more problematic time-wise since I was elected as a District Councillor. Not only does it keep me from seeing my friends as often as I would like, but it can also stop me from keeping my (good) ear to the ground, which ironically, is what I was elected to do. We have been going to this lunch for years. By we I mean the Young Mummies. And the reason I know this is because we (that is me and my friends) are referred to as the Young Mummy Table. Now we may well have been Young Mummies when we started attending these lunches, splattered in baby drool and so tired we could barely form a sentence. However as one of our number recently celebrated her forty ninth birthday (or forty seven if we’re still sticking to Covid years not counting), Mummies we may be, young we’re not. But that’s what we’re called now and we’re sticking with it.
I arrived second. Already there and re-arranging the tables to accommodate twelve of us was a person I shall refer to as Lively Friend. I can’t think of any other way to describe her. And if I told you that everyone who was at that lunch will know exactly to whom I am referring you would understand just how lively she is. Barrelling around a village canvassing with me last year with absolutely no hint of embarrassment she accosted people (whom she knows) and said “this is my friend, Natalie, vote for her”. Table re-arranged and re-set, we all trickled in and for the first time in forever, twelve of us were sat at the table. Catching up, exchanging stories of our Summers, our children, who is starting A levels or GCSEs, who is learning to drive, what jobs we were doing now. As our children get older we are all moving into different jobs or longer hours in our present ones. One friend is trying to move away from her profession of teaching. I suggested District Councilling if that can be a verb- she wasn’t keen. Another is starting a Masters to do with brains or psychology or something – none of us really understood – but when Lively Friend jokingly suggested we were going to be her case studies she didn’t laugh. Brunette Friend was at work but had made a cake with the entirely correct expectation that we would be testing it. Busy, busy, busy, yes still washing, was the general vibe. If I wasn’t speaking to the person sat directly next to me, hearing aid or not, it got harder and harder to follow the conversation as more and more people came into the room and the volume went up.
I was at a conference last year. It was about preventing suicide. For obvious reasons it was mostly not a very uplifting day. Before he started his speech, one of the speakers asked everyone to exchange a happy piece of information or news about themselves with the person next to them, stranger or no. Afterwards he said that he always asked people to perform this task before he started talking to them. He said that there it was lovely to watch people exchange happy stories with each other, watching one person tell another and that person’s response to it. As it got more difficult for me to follow the actual words at lunch I decided to watch instead. Across the table I could tell that one friend was clearly telling another a joke. A funny one. Probably a dirty one if I’m being honest. Another had placed a hand on another’s arm mid-conversation about something considerably more serious. From the wavy arms and expressions, one genuinely young mummy was being reassured by a young mummy that being washed and dressed and out with the baby is very ambitious indeed. A duff ear does get me down. I have to accept that there are some things that my good ear will miss. It just will. But if I stay alert I can catch the important things. Or at least try to.
The man who asked us to share happy memories with each other so he could enjoy watching the exchange between two people had lost his son to suicide. That was why he was talking to us. To try and help us to try and save someone, one person, from where his son was before he died and the utterly unfathomable grief that he and everyone who loved him must carry every single day. His name was Cameron. And he’s forever twenty one.
The Samaritans are available twenty four hours a day – Call 116 123
nataliegist.com 
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