Thankful for Priceless Burdens

Only 10 more days until Peter's surgery to replace his failed cochlear implant from 2000 with a newer model! He's so excited! And it got me thinking back to this article my husband Chris wrote for The Amplifier, Hear Indiana's publication. This picture of Peter was taken in 2004. He was a combination of Roy Rogers and his dad the football player. So intimidating!

So today I thought it would be fun to repost this article from the summer of 2004, because I was thinking what a treasure my little burdens are--those who hear, and those who need a little help to hear.

A thunderstorm has forced the Mann cubs of northwest Indianapolis to play inside on a warm summer afternoon. Mom wisely laid out the television rules long ago—a half hour for “Clifford the Big Red Dog” at 5:00 pm—and the cubs know that it is up to them to find something worthwhile and interesting to do for the next few hours.

Micah is interested in the new library books that his older siblings Peter, five, and Lydia, six, are devouring. But something on the ground—I think it is a long plastic tube attachment for our vacuum?—tempts Micah’s imagination. Micah picks up the tube and taunts Peter to join him in shouting into the tube through pursed lips.

“I am Superman,” Micah announces into the vacuum attachment with a muffled voice. But Peter, deaf since birth and the recipient of a cochlear implant at twenty-three months, miraculously understands everything Micah is giggling.

“No, I am Batman, and you’re dead!” Peter retorts at the other end of the tube. He then sticks the tube down the side of his shorts, unsheathes his newly re-imagined gun, and taunts his younger brother. Gun sound effects, furrowed eyebrows, pursed lips, lots of collateral air-borne saliva.



Gretchen, age two, has awakened from her nap and proudly dons her mother’s red heels and clomp-clomp-clomps down the hallway to our living room-turned-saloon.

“Gretchen is siwwy,” Peter laughs and all chime in for a group giggle.

We didn’t know it could be this fun. It certainly didn’t feel fun when my wife Ruth and I stood in church some four years ago and choked back tears on the Sunday morning we realized that Peter wasn’t just a “B personality” compared to his effervescent older sister, Lydia.

But, five years later, it is indeed this fun, thanks to our understanding of the blessing in our burden.

Ruth and I had the good fortune of receiving some great premarital advice that soberly reminded us of the biblical imperative to “bear each other’s burdens.” This implies, to a significant extent, that we soberly view each other as a burden.

Is this any way to run a marriage? The dictionary defines burden as “something difficult to bear” and any marriage veteran knows that marriage is simply tough work peppered with deepening rewards over time. Two people commit to shedding childish self-absorption in a life-long journey of realizing true happiness.

And like adults, children are both burdens and blessings. Burdens are actually blessings-in-the-making because these burdens are not just static things with no purpose or plan. They are dynamic elements to our lives and we see a larger plan working through them.

Of course, this is not to minimize the pain and tragedy of a disability; we would not wish deafness nor any kind of disability upon anybody for any blessing, perceived or real. But it now seems evident to us that God, in his mysterious providence, sees fit to visit the Mann family with this curious economy of burden and blessings. The paraplegic, the retarded, the amputee, the blind, the deaf, the overweight, the hyper-talkative…all share in common with me the fact that we’re all burdens to each other. We burden in different ways, but we all take up space, breathe air, eat, drink and burden somebody.

The Superman/Batman bravado-fest is, predictably, now out of hand and somebody’s feelings are hurt. Crying, mayhem, etc. Gretchen, clueless about either the cacophony or our grocery budget, wants more duce (orange juice, which evidently isn’t just for breakfast, lunch, and dinner anymore). Mom settles the mayhem and then reaches for the vacuum to pick up where she left off, for the umpteenth time this morning. But where is that tube attachment? It will have to wait: Peter’s cochlear implant processor is beeping incessantly because the battery is low. Low? It’s only a few hours old…it must be on its last legs. Ouch, time to buy expensive replacements.

Like every Mann family member with a quirk (and there are a few), or a disability (we’ve got a few of those too, and deafness is only one of the many shapes and sizes), Peter’s disability has certainly burdened the family. But having a hearing impaired child has taught us the wisdom of a larger economy: Increased OJ budget--$20. Batteries for a cochlear implant--$320. Discovering anew that we all present burdens that need bearing and are profoundly blessed for it—priceless.