Ineffable Chagrin --Two Word Challenge

My granddaughter is deaf. Actually, with her hearing aid, and reading lips, she can do quite well, though I often have trouble understanding what she has said to me. I've not always been quite sure she understood what I told her. Because she is a 20 year old, I felt I should not question her to make sure she was on the same page as I was, and then later, I found out she misunderstood completely.

With her deaf friends she signs fluently. I noticed that there is a deaf culture that I am not part of--language I am not part of. When these friends have been over, it's as if I'm not there. They sign at the dinner table as if I'm invisible. Once in a while my granddaughter would turn to me and speak, but usually she also is completely absorbed with the sign language.

As a young child of 4, she used to sign while she talked to us. I have video tapes of her telling wonderful tales about "the little worm and the bird", or "two kittens went walking". She would make the stories up and sign them as she told these to us. What an animated child she was!

As she grew up, she moved away with her mother. We had no contact with her for 8 years. My son tried to find his daughter, but his former wife disappeared for those 8 years. Finally our granddaughter contacted us, left her mother and came back to us. She had changed. Though there were still glimpses of the wondrous child she had been, her veneer had taken on the habits of her mother. Though she was still loving, her mother had neglected her too long. Though she had that sparkly personality from the little girl, she had taken on a hardness from being used and unappreciated. She was a survivor.

Her father tried to have her live there with his two other children. Her promiscuity was more than they could take. I tried having her with me, but there was a wall, a curtain that had come down. Was it her existence in the deaf culture? Was it her learned survival techniques in the mother's household, men in constant change. Was it her confusion of which world she lived in--deaf, hearing, mother, father, grandmother, special education, regular school?

I do not know. Since she has left me, she is already in her third relationship with a man she has met on the internet. She is living far from any family of hers. Estranged from her mother, and not willing to live with rules with us, our little darling is no longer that to us. For her she cannot speak of it. Could she sign it? For us there is ineffable chagrin.