Wherefore it came to pass, when the time was come about after Hannah had conceived, that she bare a son, and called his name Samuel, saying, Because I have asked him of the Lord.

I Samuel 1:20

Before I was born, my mother suffered several miscarriages. I would have been the youngest child, not the eldest, had I been born if these fetuses survived. With a heavy heart, my parents sat down and implored God for his mercy and prayed for a son. A deaf son.

Before exploring avenues of indignity, consider this:
At a very young age, both my mother and father underwent a bout of serious childhood illnesses with onsets of fevers that destroyed their hearing. Until late in high school, my father was placed in an oral language school which taught that using gestures to communicate was wrong; he went to Gallaudet University after a short stint at the Texas School for the Deaf. My mother was the only deaf child in a small town in Upstate New York and had her first exposure to sign language after she graduated high school. They both endured their own tribulations towards comprehending and accommodating a world that viewed their condition as an aberration. Events conspired to bring them together at a deaf bible college in Kansas City, where they met and before long, married.

Reflecting on their respective lives growing up deaf, they knew they wanted a deaf son, to allow him an experience of the world denied themselves. They were determined to make a difference for the boy, to show him and their own parents there was a much more kinder approach to raising a child with deafness. That this particular disability wasn’t something to be wrestled into submission, but something to be compromised with, and from an unique perspective, used as a tool.

So they prayed for a deaf child and into a silence asked of the Lord, I was born unto Jerry and Leslie Sanders.

by Samuel Sanders
Olathe, KS