My Son, the Cyborg

When Big Kid was first implanted, I knew very few people who understood what it meant to have a cochlear implant. Fortunately I met some implanted adults and parents of implanted children who could help explain to me what was happening to my child. I also read Michael Chorost's book, Rebuilt. Michael Chorost used the word "cyborg" throughout his book.  At this time my son was already fascinated with robots, and even chose to be a robot for Halloween. My son is a cyborg.

An article by Michael Chorost was published a few months ago,  in which he discusses his use of the word "cyborg" in his books: Why I Walked Away from the Word "Cyborg", Psychology Today, March 19, 2013. His article intrigues me enough to want to read his second book. What stuck out to me most in the article, though, were his thoughts about the changes to his life because of his cochlear implant:

"A few weeks after I went deaf, my audiologist handed me a cochlear implant that had been opened up so that the circuitry was visible. It was shocking. This thing, this circuit board, this maze of chips and wires and resistors, was going to go inside my head. Permanently. That was scary enough, but what was even more intimidating was knowing that it would forever change the way I perceived the world. It wouldn't give me normal hearing. It wouldn't even give me back the poor and partial hearing I’d had since birth. Things would sound completely different in a way that no one could describe to me.

My body was about to change in a way that it hadn't since puberty."

My son faces enough challenges in life with being a military child, constantly moving, changing schools, making new friends. The cochlear implant sticks out on his head, and is an obvious sign to other that he is DIFFERENT.

As a mother, I'd like my son to be "normal" and not stick out from other children as different in any obvious way. With the cochlear implant this is nearly impossible. Over the years, though, I've accepted that there is no true "normal" in life. I've taught each of my sons that we are all quite different from each other, and that some people have differences that are more obvious than others.

Despite Big Kid's longer hair, his second cochlear implant will make it even more obvious that he is different, that he is a "cyborg". He is also a high school student who texts his friends, studies geometry, Arabic and AP History, and is looking forward to swimming in the pool with his new waterproof cochlear implant. There was no parenting manual to help guide me through these unique child rearing challenges. Big Kid will have his second cochlear implant activated in about a month, and we are very excited. ;)