‘I thought of all the times I’d had to shout and my heart shrivelled up’: life with my hearing-impaired father

Their relationship was marked by confusion and frustration – until an episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills prompted author Katherine Heiny to take her father for a hearing test

A simple enough thing: a phone call. My son calls me from army airborne school where he is learning to be a paratrooper. I can’t wait to hear how his first jump went. Someone I gave birth to has just leapt out of a plane and dropped 1,250ft to Earth – could any call be more exciting? But it’s a bad connection, and his voice is muffled and distorted. I can make out only every third word, and even then I’m guessing at what he might be saying. “You have to call me back,” I say, even though a callback is never guaranteed in the military. “This is unbearable.”

It was unbearable, and yet it’s how my father heard the world. Or more accurately, how he didn’t hear the world. For him, every conversation was muted and indistinct, an exercise in frustration. I lasted two minutes listening under those conditions. My father lasted far longer.

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