Jodee Mundy is the only person in her immediate family who can hear. Her mother and father are both deaf. Her two elder brothers, Shane and Gavin, are deaf. So too are her two sisters-in-law (one of who comes from a family with three generations of deafness) and her her two nieces and nephew (one other nephew, Oskar, can hear). Cast the net wider and Jodee's family includes a deaf aunt, uncle, two great-great-aunts and a succession of deaf cats.
"I remember when I first realised my family were deaf," says Jodee. "I was five. Mum and I were in a shop looking at the Barbies. Mum signed to me that it was time to go. I was so absorbed in the dolls that when I looked around she'd gone. I was lost. So I ran to the front desk and the woman there made an announcement on the Tannoy: 'Gillian Mundy, your daughter is waiting for you at the front desk.' She kept repeating it, but Mum didn't come. I had this anxiety that she would never come back. Then Mum appeared through the clothing racks and signed to me, 'Where have you been? I've been so worried.' And I said, 'But the lady made an announcement.' And Mum just looked at me and said, 'I'm deaf, you know that.' And it just hit me, what that actually meant - that she couldn't hear."
This was the pivotal moment when she realised that her mum's normality was everyone else's abnormality. "Suddenly I was different. I remember walking away with Mum to the car park and we were signing and people were looking at us, and I'd never noticed it before. From that day on I realised how society was treating my family."
Jodee's parents, Peter and Gillian, are both the children of hearing parents and met through a deaf church camp in their 20s. While Peter's parents were very supportive of his deafness, Gillian's had more difficulties, not least because after Gillian's birth, and that of her deaf sister, the family found themselves excommunicated by the rest of the family. "They had these two deaf kids so they were ostracised," says Jodee. "So Mum and my aunty never knew their wider circle of family. I've never met them either because of that hearing/deaf divide."
For the Mundy family, deafness is not merely a physical attribute that sets them apart from hearing relatives, but also the glue that binds them together. As a child of deaf adults (or "coda" as they are referred to in the deaf community), Jodee occupies a unique position between two cultures. As a hearing person she is a minority in her family, yet her entrenchment within deaf culture means she can never fully belong in the hearing world either. "I'm bicultural. I'm hearing but inside I have a deaf identity. I'm like a river," explains Jodee. "There is the hearing bank and there is the deaf bank; I can't be on either bank, but I can always run in between connecting the two."
Her experience is replicated across the world. Coda International, an American-led organisation set up in 1983 to address the bicultural experiences of hearing children of deaf adults, has hundreds of members and holds retreats, summer camps and international conferences.
"I went to a coda International conference a few years ago. There was a workshop there for OHCODAs, which stands for Only Hearing Child of Deaf Adults. I really related to that group because like me, they had no other hearing siblings. It was very powerful sitting in a room with 13 other people, out of 400 people at the conference, who were exactly like me. It was a really spiritual experience. For once in that room I wasn't different."
These conferences provide the rare opportunity for codas to meet and share stories about their upbringing, many of which include tales of being the family interpreter before deaf people had access to communication technology.
"Dad was a carpenter," says Jodee. "There was no email, fax or text so every night his boss would phone and I would take the call and write down the address and what he wanted doing. He would say, 'It's a three-storey house and I want you to do the flooring and banisters.' I didn't even know what it meant."
It wasn't just the mundane that Jodee interpreted, but sometimes confusing and frightening situations as well. "When I was eight, we had a visit from a priest. I remember we were stood in the back yard and the priest asked if Mum would like to go to his church as they had interpreted nights and that if she came he could heal her. I relayed this in sign language and Mum said that God had made her the way she was and she was happy being deaf. But the priest said we needed to get the devil out of her, that she was possessed with an evil spirit.
"He kept pressuring her and started speaking in tongues. I was confused. I turned to her and said, 'Maybe he can heal you?' But Mum was adamant and asked him to leave. There was a big argument and she kicked him out through the back gate."
The main pressures, Jodee argues, don't come from within the family, but from outside. "We would be out somewhere and people would stare. I would often overhear people saying things like, 'Oh, it's so sad they are deaf and dumb', or they would mock us for signing." It's comments such as these that lead to many children of deaf parents assuming the role of stigma manager, as well as family interpreter, by keeping negative comments to themselves rather than running the risk of hurting family members. The coda becomes the cultural broker, Jodee argues, shielding the deaf family from negative attitudes, while trying to normalise their deafness to the hearing world. "We'd go to the shops and people would talk to me and not Mum," says Jodee. "They would treat her as if she was stupid. People would say, 'Can I help you?' and I used to make up a deep voice and say, 'No, I'm fine thanks,' and pretend the voice was coming from her so they would leave us alone. I don't think Mum ever knew I did that."
As someone who is often mistaken as deaf when she is out with her family, Jodee has grown up overhearing not just comments said behind her family's back but those audaciously uttered right under their noses. "My parents were over in London recently and we were all signing away in a restaurant and right next to us was a couple having a big conversation about us. They thought we were all deaf and couldn't hear them. I was livid. I turned to them and said, 'Excuse me, I find it really off-putting that you are talking about us.' They were quite surprised and snapped back, 'We can say whatever we want.' I told them to respect that there are people in the world that can sign and hear.
"I am so used to people asking me questions. It's like a stuck record. They'll say, "Do your parents drive? Do they work?" If I am at a dinner party and someone says "So what's it like having a deaf family?" I'll answer politely but sometimes, if I'm not in the mood, I'll throw it back at them and say "What does your dad do? And he can hear? Wow!" I know it is a big deal for other people that my family are deaf, but for me, it's what I've always known. It's normal. It's like people being amazed that your dad has brown hair.
"The fact that most people think talking is the only way to communicate is so narrow-minded because hearing people are the ones who can't communicate when they are on a bus and there is someone outside waving goodbye. They are the ones who can't communicate under water if they are scuba diving. They are the ones that can't communicate across the street or in a loud nightclub. It's deaf people who can. I wish people would see the richness and the wealth of the deaf world."