Moving Hands

I’ve moved around a lot in my life, so I sometimes struggle with the idea of home. Where is my true home? Many people that I know feel most comfortable within a community of like minds, but I’ve decided that I personally feel at home wherever communication is fluent.

I grew up using a rather obscure method of manual communication. You’ll notice that I don’t even name it – that’s because so few people use it that I’d be easily identifiable if I named it. From here on I’ll just call it MC.

My family uses a blend of MC and straight-up speaking to communicate with me, so when I talk with my family, I can understand them completely. It’s most obvious with my younger sister. She’s the only person who’s ever been able to completely understand me fluently from the start and vice-versa – my parents weren’t very good at MC when I was a kid, and my speech or handwriting weren’t very good. So, even though my sister and I are total polar opposites in almost every respect, including appearance, we get along really well. We can communicate easily on a practical level due to MC and we just understand each other instantly because we’re siblings.

Speaking and signing are both things that I learned comparatively late in life. I feel comfortable with both modes of communication at this point, but MC still feels more like my native tongue. That’s not really the right phrase because MC is a visual representation of spoken language rather than a true language¹ but I still feel that way.

I’ve felt at home in other places – with my translators who use MC, in Deaf camp, within a trio of queer women (one of whom learned how to use MC), and so forth. But those have come and gone, so my family has probably been the most constant source of fluent communication throughout my life. So, even though my family members currently live in a place with completely unfamiliar flora and fauna, I still feel at home with them. I feel rather fortunate to be so close to my family when many people that I know aren’t.

1. Unlike most other modes of manual communication that hearing people have created, though, it doesn’t try to rearrange ASL signs into English grammar. [↩]