By Avia Ustanny, Outlook Writer 
My mother keeps me safe, says 13-year-old May-Esther
LYNEVE MCLEISH is five feet nine inches tall and her daughter May-Esther, who is only 13 years old, is almost as tall as her.
Today the two look more like sisters when they begin to chat, hands flashing in half sign language, half lip-reading.
The 13-year-old, apart from her height and the fact that she is hearing-impaired is just like any normal teenager.
Her mother told Outlook that once she would sign for her at church, but now that the teen has become so self-conscious, she has resorted to simply repeating the words that are being said.
Encouraged by her mother, May-Esther has developed some speech and told Outlook that she likes virtually every subject that she does at school.
"She is a straight A student at school," her mother inserts.
May-Esther, a student at Lista Mair Gilby High School, has hopes of becoming either a nurse, an accountant or a psychologist and lists her preferred subjects as social studies, accounting, mathematics, language and geography.
Her smile is the size of a Cheshire cat as she names her best friends at school, Bolivia and Nicole, and confesses further that what she really likes to do is to go out.
May-Esther loves nothing so much as to go shopping.
She says that she also enjoys going fishing in Lacovia, St. Elizabeth.
The 13-year-old is also an avid reader. Soon after Outlook arrived at her home in Kingston, she borrowed the reporter's Readers' Digest. Her mother said that she also loves every newspaper. Perhaps she uses current events as a way of knowing what is going on in the hearing world.
Well adjusted
Mother Lyneve is now well adjusted to the fact that her daughter is a hearing-impaired individual who will have to live in a hearing society, but this was not always so.
When May-Esther was one year old, she was shocked when told by the specialist at the Caribbean Hearing Centre that her daughter had only 20 per cent of her hearing. This was the reason why, at the age of 12 months, she was still without a word in language.
"It was very difficult for me," the mother recalls.
So much in denial was she that she left everything to the child's father, her first husband, to do. He was the one who attended sign language classes. Later when Lyneve realised that her husband was not coping at all, she got more involved.
She began to teach her words by allowing her to place her hand on her throat, feel the vibration and repeat the sound. She also labelled furnishings around the house. With May-Esther also attending the JAD Pre-school centre in Papine, soon her daughter was well adjusted and developing satisfactorily.
Now, her mother says, "few people know that May-Esther is hearing-impaired. She is very assertive and completely socialised. She makes friends easily too."
We asked May-Esther what she thought about her mother. Her answer was "She is a Christian. She keeps me safe." She has come to see her mother's kindness as manifestation of what she was taught at church.
Her mother replies, "The key to the parenting issue is communication. I would also say to every parent that they should put God first in their children's lives."
