"Suddenly, Dad stopped talking. He looked from one of us to the other. “I just noticed something,” he said. “You’re totally calm, and your mother is getting really upset.”
“Of course she is,” I said. “You’re telling her to her face that something she experienced, didn’t happen. What the hell did you expect?”
It was an outburst that, a few years earlier, would have sent him into an aria of self-justification. Instead, he absorbed what I’d said and sat back in his chair. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Then he motioned to my mom to finish her side of the story.
The adjustment happened slowly, over the course of months: Without the ability to jump in and redirect, my father was forced to sit on his hands. He had to listen for the patterns of other people’s speech, to wait for breaks in the conversation, little moments of silence where he could actually make himself heard."
FB: "When his voice disappeared, it cracked open a way of interacting — with colleagues, friends, even his own family — that he’d never considered before. And it made some of his most earnest, deeply held beliefs a bit less theoretical and more real. He learned what it was like to be silenced."
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