Mother Tongue

Sara Nović is a deaf writer and mother of two sons. S, age five, is fair-skinned and hearing; K, age six, has brown skin, wears hearing aids, and is deaf. S was born in Philadelphia; K was born in Thailand and lived in a government orphanage for over four years before joining the family. The memoir weaves her personal story with centuries of deaf history, the politics of language, and the fight to build a family across culture, disability, and adoption.

Nović opens with a framework from the social sciences: Cultural transmission can be vertical (parent to child), oblique (from non-parental elders), or horizontal (between peers). Over 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents who never learn sign language, so most deaf people receive their culture horizontally and late. Adoption complicates this further; Nović can transmit deaf culture to K but cannot give him access to his Thai birth culture, a limitation she calls "a failing of adoption" (5). She frames American Sign Language (ASL) as the connective thread binding her family.

Nović's hearing loss began around age 12, arriving slowly and unevenly. When she failed a school hearing screening in seventh grade, she destroyed the failure notice and cheated on the retest by watching the nurse's hand through a gap in a curtain. Having never met a deaf person, she understood hearing loss only as a deficiency, hid behind textbooks, taught herself to lipread, and poured energy into choir and the school newspaper.

Throughout the memoir, Nović interleaves personal narrative with deaf history. She traces anti-deaf attitudes from antiquity through early Christianity's framing of deafness as divine punishment. She contrasts these with Martha's Vineyard, where hereditary deafness was so common, as high as 1 in 25 residents in the town of Chilmark, that both deaf and hearing islanders used a shared sign language. Deafness there was a neutral trait, and deaf residents held leadership positions, demonstrating that disability is often a social construction.

She recounts the 1817 founding of what became the American School for the Deaf, where Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a pastor, and Laurent Clerc, a deaf French instructor, established manual education. Students brought regional signs that merged with French Sign Language to form ASL. She then traces how Alexander Graham Bell, driven by eugenics, campaigned to remove ASL from schools, arguing that eliminating sign language would prevent deaf people from forming community. The 1880 Milan Conference, at which 164 delegates, only one of them deaf, voted to ban sign language, ushered in an 80-year period in which deaf teachers were fired, children's hands were restrained, and generations grew up without access to language.

Nović's discovery of ASL came during a summer job at Kmart before her senior year of high school. She began looking up signs and felt immediate relief, describing ASL as "like aloe for a burn or a brace for a broken bone" (38). In college in Boston, she sought help from the Office of Disability Services and received hearing aids and interpreters. Her dormmates responded by withdrawing, but she found community at a church service, where signing people made space for her. She calls this moment a conversion: She first had to be "broken enough to accept the real offering" (47), which was friendship.

Nović also lived with arrhythmia that caused blackouts and years of misdiagnosis. Music and choir had covered for her declining hearing until a devastating choir trip incident led her to stop singing for over a decade. She reclaimed music only when she instinctively sang to soothe S as a newborn. The memoir traces her journey through evangelical Christianity and purity culture, which taught her that attraction to both boys and girls was sinful. She married her high school sweetheart at 20; when he realized he was gay in his mid-20s, she spiraled. She describes religious deconstruction as essential to recognizing her queerness.

Nović recounts her pregnancy with S and the ableism she encountered from doctors alarmed by her deafness. She connects this to the history of eugenics, including the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, which upheld the forced sterilization of disabled people, and the Nazi Aktion T4 program, which murdered over 250,000 disabled people. In March 2020, with S eight months old, she contracted what she believed was Covid-19. With her partner Z laid off and their insurance lost, she refused hospitalization, fearing both bankruptcy and triage decisions that might deprioritize her as a deaf patient.

The idea of adopting K formed during the pandemic. S's first word was a sign at nine months, and his ASL far outpaced his English. When Nović heard of parents unable to communicate with deaf children sent home from residential schools during lockdowns, she realized she could offer a deaf child accessible language. She found K on an adoption listing and carried the laptop to Z. Nović investigates the adoption industry's history of corruption. Z, himself adopted from Chile, remained steadfast that adoption represented a far greater good. K became eligible as a "waiting child," for whom international adoption is often the only option.

The process required over 100 pages of documentation and extensive background checks. Their completed dossier arrived at a courier's office shredded, adding months to the wait. Covid lockdowns cut off contact with K's orphanage, and Nović feared he was nearing the neurological point of no return for language acquisition. When K's visa was approved, the family flew to Bangkok. K appeared in a white linen shirt, looked over his new parents' heads, and began to cry. Over the following weeks, ASL captivated him; he memorized a bedtime routine in sign overnight.

Back in Philadelphia, systems failed K. An audiologist dismissed his Thai medical records and concluded his communication difficulties reflected personal choice. The school district's Individualized Education Program (IEP) team argued K had enough hearing to be mainstreamed. When Nović advocated for deaf school, the district's lawyer accused her of delaying K's development by teaching him sign. Their educational advocate sobered her: "they're not required to do what's best for him" (232). Nović also examines how deafness intersects with race, cataloging police violence against deaf people and citing research showing half of those killed by police have a disability.

After a year of fighting, K was referred to a deaf school. His ASL vocabulary surpassed 750 signs, and he began describing orphanage memories, confirming language was taking hold. K presented a class collage, signing: "What's my identity? I'm five years old. I'm Thai. I'm Jewish. I'm deaf. I have brown skin. I'm an adoptee."

The memoir closes with Nović confronting threats to deaf existence, including gene therapies targeting hereditary deafness and political efforts to gut disability protections and education funding. She memorializes Mark Kozyk, a deaf man who died by suicide after a lifetime of language deprivation, quoting his words: "Language is a love code" (248). She finds hope in George Veditz, a National Association of the Deaf president who filmed ASL over a century ago when the language seemed endangered, and in her two boys: K, "a walking 'despite everything'" (249), and S, a native signer who "moves freely through the liminal" (250). She concludes: "And so, through them, it will live on" (250).