Improve Your English: English in Everyday Life

19
THE FAMILY
In this chapter, interviewees talk about life in their 
families.
1. A FAMILY IN MARYLAND
MAN:
Family. I’ve been married to my wife for about sev-
enteen, eighteen years. We married young, at the age of 
twenty-one and twenty-two. And we initially, for years, 
did not want children. We did a lot of traveling to a num-
ber of diff erent countries, and fi nally, uh, somewhere 
around thirty-two, thirty-three, I looked at my wife 
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and said, “Well, you’re not getting any younger, so if we 
wanna
do this, we better go ahead and start working on 
this.” And so we made a decision to have children, and I 
have a daughter, Caitlin Cherie, who is 
four and a half 
years old, going on fi fty
. She’s also fl uent in 
American 
Sign Language
. In fact, from 
day one
in the delivery 
room, I remember signing to her because I wanted to 
make this imprint on her brain, this language imprint for 
visual language, and so, uh, we have a special bond not 
just because she was my fi rst daughter but also through 
American Sign Language. Um, it’s amazing to me, not 
coming from a deaf family, to see how language develops 
in a child who does not use, does not have deafness in the 
family. But she, uh, uses American Sign Language very, 
pretty fl uently, and we have deaf people in our lives all the 
time, and so that’s been a big help for her. She came, uh, 
to a program after moving to this area at Gallaudet Uni-
versity called the, um, Child Development Center, and in 
that program—it’s a day care center where they have, uh, 
parents with deaf children attending the day care cen-
ter, the teachers are occasionally deaf and it’s just a really 
nice environment. And so she was in that program for 
about a year and a half. And so that’s my daughter Cait-
lin. I-I love my daughter; I’m so in love with her. Uh, I 
also have a son who’s nine months old; his name is Levi 
Joseph. And, we are bonding and having fun, and he is 
at nine months, he’s speaking several words, and he has 
about four-four or fi ve signs. So at this point, living in the 
area, it’s, uh, my wife and two children, a girl and a boy.