My Husband Was Deaf For Two Years. Then One Night In The Kitchen, He Spoke To Me In Perfect English. How Do I Ever Trust Him Again?
A Web of Lies
“Does your mother know that you’re not actually deaf?”
He hesitated, just a moment, but it was enough.
“Oh my god.”
I backed away from him, my hands instinctively going to my belly.
“Your mother knows? She’s known this whole time? The tears at dinner, the gratitude that I accepted you despite your disability… that was all part of it? She was trying to help me find the right person?”
“By lying!”
I was shouting now. I don’t think I’d ever shouted like that in my life.
“By tricking some desperate woman into marriage? By making me learn a whole language, quit my job, give up my entire life for a lie?”
“You didn’t give up your life. You chose to learn sign language. You chose to quit your job.”
“Because I thought my husband was deaf!”
The words ripped out of my throat.
“I thought you needed me to do those things! I thought I was being supportive! I thought I was being a good wife to a man with a disability! But you don’t have a disability. You have a sociopath for a mother and apparently no moral compass of your own.”
Richard’s face paled.
“That’s not fair.”
“Fair? You want to talk about fair? I learned an entire language for you. I quit my career for you. I’m carrying your child.”
My voice broke.
“I’m six months pregnant with your child and you’ve been lying to my face for two years.”
“I wasn’t lying to your face. You couldn’t see my face when we were signing.”
“Get out.”
“Margaret, please…”
“Get out of my house!”
“It’s our house.”
“I don’t care! Get out! Go stay with your mother since you two are apparently best friends and partners in fraud!”
He left. Actually left. Grabbed his keys and walked out the door, leaving me alone in the kitchen with the grilled chicken burning on the stove and my entire world in ruins.
I don’t remember much of that night. I know I called my sister Catherine, sobbing so hard she couldn’t understand me at first. She drove over immediately, found me sitting on the kitchen floor surrounded by all the sign language books I’d been studying, tearing pages out one by one.
“He’s not deaf,”
I kept saying.
“He was never deaf. It was all fake. All of it.”
Catherine held me while I cried, her hand rubbing my back the way our mother used to when we were children, which reminded me.
“I have to call Mom.”
“Maybe wait until tomorrow.”
But I was already dialing. My mother answered on the third ring, her voice cheerful.
“Margaret! I wasn’t expecting to hear from you tonight. How’s my son-in-law?”
“Did you know?”
Silence.
“Mom, did you know?”
“What, dear?”
“That Richard isn’t deaf? That he’s been pretending this whole time? That he and Dorothy cooked up this entire scheme to test whether I was worthy of their precious son?”
More silence. Then:
“Dorothy mentioned they wanted to make sure any woman Richard married would be committed for the right reasons.”
I hung up on her. On my own mother. Hung up and threw the phone across the room where it shattered against the wall.
“She knew,”
I told Catherine.
“My own mother knew I was being manipulated and she went along with it. She probably thought she was helping, getting her spinster daughter married off at last.”
“Oh, Maggie.”
Catherine’s eyes were full of tears. That’s what she called me when we were kids. Maggie. No one else called me that. Not Richard, who’d only ever signed my full name. Not his mother. Not my mother. Just Catherine.
“What am I going to do?”
I whispered.
“I’m six months pregnant. I quit my job. All my savings went into this house. I can’t just… I can’t…”
But I couldn’t finish the sentence because I didn’t know what I couldn’t do. Leave? Stay? Start over? I was 33 years old, six months pregnant, unemployed, and I just discovered my entire marriage was built on a lie.
