First Sign of Hearing Loss in Preschool

I was four years old, dressed in a sombrero and serape, holding a maraca, and I had no idea what anyone was singing.

My preschool class was rehearsing Mexican songs for a parent performance. We sat in a big circle, practicing. The other kids were learning the lyrics. I wasn’t. I couldn’t pick them up no matter how many times we ran through them.

During one rehearsal, the teacher stopped the music. She looked right at me and asked, in front of everyone, why I wasn’t singing.

I broke down crying. “I don’t know the words.”

That was the first sign. Nobody recognized it yet, but something was different about the way I heard the world. Or didn’t hear it.

Here’s the part that still hits me: even today, with modern hearing aids, I cannot hear lyrics in music. Not clearly. Not without streaming audio directly into my ears. What looked like a four-year-old not paying attention was actually the earliest evidence of permanent hearing loss.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t trying. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. My ears physically could not separate the words from the melody, the rhythm, the noise of twenty kids shuffling and shaking maracas.

That preschool moment wasn’t a phase. It was the beginning of a story I’m still living.

This is the first post in a year-long series about my hearing loss journey, from that circle of kids in sombreros to the technology that finally changed everything. Every Friday, I’ll share a piece of it.