Missing Letters

What one workshop in Louisville taught me about being my daughter’s ally

By Rizwana Jmari

The sentence on the screen had holes in it.

Kay_ee cou__ _ear e_ery__ing Mrs. _ura_ _aid, e_en __en __e _urned _o wri_e o_ the _oard.

I read it twice and got maybe half. Then Katherine Rybak put the same sentence back up in capital letters, bigger, and the holes sat in exactly the same places. Louder had changed nothing. The sentence was STILL broken.

Only on the third slide did it come whole. Kaylee could hear everything Mrs. Duran said, even when she turned to write on the board.

That was the moment the session earned me. Not because I learned something new about audiograms, but because I have spent years calling from another room in my own house, raising my voice at a child who could hear my volume perfectly well and was missing my consonants. Katherine had a slide for that further on. Instead of talking louder from a doorway, get her attention first, then speak. Instead of repeating the same sentence louder, rephrase it with different words. Small enough to fit on an index card, and I had been getting it wrong for years with the best intentions in the world.

“Why Don’t They Get It? Authentic Representation for Children, Authentic Language for Adults” was one of dozens of workshops at the HLAA 2026 Convention, the association’s 41st, held at the Galt House in Louisville from June 10 to 12. Katherine is a retired Teacher of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, National Board Certified, and she has been hard of hearing since birth. She sits at both ends of the thing she teaches, which is why the hour never read like curriculum.

Partway through, she asked us to turn to a neighbor and name one invisible drain and one ally skill worth trying. The mother a few seats over described a Thursday I have lived, the strategies everyone agrees to on Monday and nobody remembers by the end of the week. Behind me sat a woman who had come as somebody’s daughter rather than somebody’s mother, still working after decades to understand a parent with hearing loss, saying so out loud to strangers. I had walked in assuming I was there for a refresher on something I was already decent at. Nobody in that circle was there for a refresher.

What went up next was a list of things allies misread. Withdrawal looks antisocial when the person needs a listening break. Exhaustion looks like laziness at the end of a day spent solving auditory puzzles that everyone else got for free. A declined invitation looks like not caring when the person already knows the venue will not work. Underneath all of it sits work nobody counts, and Katherine named four kinds: the listening itself, the disclosure that starts over with every new person, the advocacy that has to be repeated because people slide back into old habits, and the daily management of devices. Her line for the whole thing was that this is not a character flaw; it is a skills gap. What she asks of an ally is not sympathy. It is changing what you believe you are seeing before you change what you do about it.

The myth she opened with is the one I had been living inside without knowing its name. Struggle, then hearing aids, then fixed. That is the shape almost every children’s book about hearing loss follows, the problem solved inside a single scene, and it is the shape I had quietly agreed to at home. The fitting appointment felt like an ending. I treated it like one. Meanwhile my house is still loud, we still forget the strategies by Thursday, and listening is still hard on an ordinary day with nothing going wrong in it. A story that ends at the device leaves the child alone with everything that comes after the device, and I had been handing my daughter that ending in good faith, thinking I was the ally in the room. Ages eight to twelve is where Katherine put the stakes, the window where a kid decides whether this is something to hide or something to own.

So, she wrote different books. The Hearing Empowered Kids series is realistic fiction for exactly that age, no magic fixes. A Little Mic, A Big Change follows Kaylee and Zoe, where self-advocacy meets a friend actually learning what to do. Signs on the Court follows Mateo and Diego through stigma and hidden hearing aids. I bought them at the table afterward and Katherine signed them, a set for my daughter and copies for the deaf and hard of hearing classmates she sits with at school.

I took both adult books too. Becoming Hearing Empowered is a guided journal rather than a book you read, working from the mechanics of hearing loss and how to read your own audiogram through internalized stigma and disclosing clearly when the conversation does not go the way you planned. There is a section on giving your audiologist specific feedback about programming instead of a vague sense that something is off. Katherine notes that people wait an average of nine years before seeking support, which tells you the book is aimed at the shame and not the equipment. My daughter’s copy is on a shelf until she is old enough to write in it. Better to have it waiting for her early than to go looking for it late.

Becoming an Empowered Hearing Ally is the companion, and I did not buy it only for myself. It is going around my house, because my daughter should not have to depend on one person knowing what to do. It explains why background noise is the enemy and why “never mind, it wasn’t important” lands harder than saying nothing at all. Katherine’s replacement is the one I say now: let me try again; I want you to get this.

If you are reading this from the other side of everything I have just described, you are the one doing the four kinds of hidden work while somebody who loves you calls from the next room. The woman behind me had waited decades for a parent to learn this and had finally come to learn it herself, which is its own kind of tired. Katherine’s answer to that is not patience. A skills gap can be closed, and the person who knows what the gap feels like from the inside is the only one who can describe it accurately. What she asked of that room was small. Pick one of the invisible drains and say it out loud this week to somebody who loves you, in the plain words you would use for anything else.

Near the end she put up two columns, the things we tell ourselves when we have given up and the things we could say instead. They’ll never understand against not yet, I can help them learn. I can’t do anything right against I’m still learning. That second column is not softer. It is harder, because it commits you to keeping at something you have already failed at more than once.

Three days at the Galt House gave me a lot of rooms. Thursday morning brought a general session with manufacturers on what is coming next in hearing technology, and Friday’s research symposium, backed by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, took on artificial intelligence in hearing health. Auracast ran in the workshop rooms, the plenaries were captioned live, and ASL interpreters worked at the front. Access is the floor at that convention rather than the achievement, and sitting in a room built that way is worth the trip on its own. I will go back, and I would tell any parent in this chapter to come.

The hour that changed how I behave at home had no equipment on its agenda at all. Interpreters at the front, a retired teacher at the screen, a broken sentence, and the rest of us sitting inside it.

I went to Louisville as a parent who thought she was already an ally. I came home understanding that being one is not a feeling I have. It is a set of moves I either know or do not know yet.

My daughter is watching how I move through rooms like that one. She will learn more from what I practice than from anything I tell her.