Writing to be heard

How writing a children’s book about hearing loss helped a hard-of-hearing author find her voice

- By YVETTE TAN

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Life doesn’t always go the way we expect, but sometimes, sidequests can lead to personal discoveries that touch the lives of others.

Bambi Rodriguez, a special education teacher who works with children with autism, always knew that she would write books one day. However, she ended up writing about something more personal.

She is the author of the Super Maya series, which follows Maya, a four-year-old who learns how to navigate life as a person of disability who is hard of hearing (PWD-HOH).

Rodriguez has been hard of hearing from birth. “My family and I had never talked about it. It was something I just grew up living with,” Rodriguez said. “It wasn’t top of mind for me to talk about, so my advocacy was always something else.”

Hearing got more challenging as she got older. “Communication got more difficult, and... when they would ask me about it, I would get very defensive because I wasn’t used to talking about it.”

She realized that most of the time, people asked about her disability because they wanted to understand her, not embarrass her as she initially feared. “I realized that if I didn’t start talking about it, if I didn’t describe what I was going through, they really won’t be able to help me... I started realizing that I needed to self-advocate.”