“Where is Corisa, short and Stoudt?” sang the counselor.

It was Summer Fun camp and I froze: mostly from the shock that until that moment no one besides me had thought of this mocking. It didn’t help that I was a Haole living in Hawaii which automatically made me not the shortest but definitely the largest student in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and at the time of this incident, 6th grade. I walked, head-down-compromising-smile, to my place in the morning line-up.

Stoudt was my dad’s last name (technically, my stepfather). It took 10 years for the school board to realize I had been living under a false identity. I remember it felt strange to be accused of this, as though we weren’t a family and had been lying. I had the choice of switching to my biological father’s name or having my present dad adopt me. No problem, dad said and he filed the paperwork. However, the other man involved refused to “give up” the children he had not seen for a decade.

“I’m changing my last name,” I told the boy I had a crush on – I don’t remember his name.

“What, are you getting married?”

I laughed and it felt good not to be a child bride only the product of divorce and remarriage.

Not much later my family moved to California. I was now in 8th grade shifting from one foot to the other in my polyester gym shorts and baggy white t-shirt outside the PE teacher’s office. Three Cholas walked by. The peaks of their bangs stood at least four inches high. I’d never seen anything like it. We didn’t have Cholas in Hawaii. They wore thick make-up on eyes and on lips and snug revealing jeans. Signs of a world I had yet to discover were tracked by the bruises on their necks. I was in awe.

“Corisa, what’s your last name?” the gym teacher asked trying to find me on the roster.

“Moreno.” The syllabus came out weakly.

The Cholas heard me. They stopped and had to ask, perhaps because of my poorly coiffed hair. “Mo-re-no. Are you Mexican?”

“My father’s Mexican,” I said. These are my people? I thought.

*

Amongst other things, it took studying Spanish and learning to dance Salsa for me to grow into my inner Latina, but really, I’ll always be a little Stoudt. The carnitas help with that.

by Corisa Moreno
Oakland, CA

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

1. Storms are brewin’ in your eyes (Starship)
2. You’re the poet in my heart (Fleetwood Mac)
3. Won’t you smile a while for me (Hall & Oates)

***

“Hi. I’m Sarah.”
“Ooooh have you heard that song…”
The eyes close, the head drops, and the hand-mic comes out.

Innocent fun, right? I feel there is one thing people tend to forget about these songs:
Even though they contain some of the most dramatic lyrics of the 70s and 80s, they are pop songs, chart-toppers, if you will. In general, one of the reasons a pop song becomes a universal hit is due to the vague nature of its lyrics, i.e., everyone can find a sense of “application” within them. So, as a “Sarah” experiment, I have collaged three Sarah songs into a poem that I feel highlights the fact that these love songs could have been written about any woman with a two-syllable name.

Feel free to substitute any name you want in the “huh-huh” space.

Waiting for the sunlight
no time is a good time for…

If you feel like leaving
hold on
there’s a heartbeat
there’s fire and ice.

(And huh-huh) loved me like no one has ever loved me before…

Alone and watching in the night
I’ll never find another girl like you
all I ever wanted
within the wings of a storm.

(And huh-huh) hurt me like no one could ever hurt me more…

I’d go anywhere
it doesn’t matter what for.
Woman’s eyes
stay until tomorrow
in the sea of love
where everyone would love to drowned.

If you’re reading this and realizing that upon introducing yourself to a Sarah you too have dropped to bended knee and belted out “No time is a good time for goodbye,” then know this: I don’t blame you. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that we all agree with that line. But, I guess, that’s just my point.

by Sarah Suzor
Boulder, CO

How can a person who is an Only Child - me - wind up in such a mess and at such a tender age, too?

Many years ago, after twelve years of marriage and a fitful, but singular pregnancy, my mother had me. She was ready with two boys’ and two girls’ names, picked out so she’d be ready to fill out the resultant hospital forms when she was called upon to do so.

But here’s the dicey part: The woman who was to become my godmother (and my mother’s best friend) was at the hospital keeping my father company while my mother was upstairs giving birth to me. She, herself, had a four year old boy, and she desperately wanted another child, hopefully a little girl, but it hadn’t happened. Indeed, it never did. My soon-to-be godmother liked the name “Susan.” In fact, she LOVED the name Susan. Somehow, in the melee that was the day I was born, the decision about my name came down to her because everybody else was either too busy elsewhere or so excited at my arrival. She told the nurse in charge of such things that she “thought” my mother wanted to name me Susan.

And so it was. For all of my first five years, I was called Karen, the name my mother chose. However, my birth certificate said I was officially Susan. It wasn’t until I got to kindergarten and my legal docs had to be produced that this became an issue. My mother, always one not to get too excited about such technicalities, never bothered to change it. Now, she couldn’t understand why the school was being so hard-assed about a simple thing like a mix-up with a name, for heaven’s sake. That Susan could have been Karen’s sister (and a different person altogether) made no sense to her because SHE knew who I was.

Of all people, she should have known better. When my mother was born, many years ago and when most normal births took place at home, the doctor and everyone else in the family in the house that day - and probably lots of neighbors and friends, too - got drunk shortly after my mother’s arrival on the planet. You see, she was the first female born in a family that already had six boys. My poor maternal grandmother had no girl’s name chosen. She just assumed she’d have another boy, and she had Anthony picked out. My mother became Anthony.

It wasn’t until years later, as an adult, when she had to go to the office where such records are kept that she discovered there was indeed two Anthonys. ( My mother has a younger brother named - you guessed it - Anthony.) She immediately knew what had happened because Anthony Number 1 was born on her birthday and Anthony Number 2 was born on her younger brother’s date of birth. Just as an aside, in what seems to be a crazy family tradition, and to make matters even more complicated, he was never called by his given name. He was called Boze, which is another story for another time. If somebody said something to me about my Uncle Anthony or worse, my Uncle Tony, I didn’t know who they meant. Uncle Boze, yes - Uncle Tony, no.

Anyway, I still have that document of long ago that says I was a Susan. I also have a document that says I’m now a corrected Karen. I would have made a happy schizophrenic.

by Karen Segboer
Warwick, NY