My deaf family has a favorite game we play in the car. Whenever we catch a whiff of something fart-like, we all quickly stick a thumb to our forehead with the palm open and perpendicular to our face. The last one to do it is officially branded the guilty party.
That’s usually when our deaf son starts wagging his finger and shaking his head in disapproval with the glee of a 5-year-old thinking about bodily functions.
Unless, of course, he’s the last one with a thumb on his forehead. Then he’ll shake his head wildly and swear up and down he’s not the culprit.
The funny thing is, it just struck me that this is uniquely a deaf thing. Hearing people wouldn’t play this game, as it would make as much sense as playing Marco Polo with your eyes open or hide-and-seek on the Death Valley salt flats.
But since my wife, kids, and I are all deaf, we’re constantly accusing each other of high crimes against the nose, sticking thumbs on our foreheads, and denying culpability with straight faces, even while ripping sphincter sirens that would make police cars jealous.
This epiphany reminds me of when I was in middle school at a summer basketball camp with about 100 deaf kids and two hearing kids who had deaf parents.
According to those hearing campers, they couldn’t believe what they were hearing on the first night.
As we dribbled, passed, and rebounded, we let loose, shooting bottom burps like how college kids light fireworks—so many whoopees and whizzpoppers that if we’d been paid a dollar for each, Bernie Sanders would be on TV calling us greedy billionaires.
And the hearing campers? Though talented on the court, they were overwhelmed, looking left and right as we ran (butt-sneezed!) circles around them.
It brings to mind a favorite joke from middle school:
Q: Why do farts stink?
A: So deaf people can enjoy them too.
Here’s another true story. I remember being mainstreamed for the first time in third grade after growing up at a deaf school. I was the only deaf kid in a class of about 25. For some mysterious reason, that first month I couldn’t stop launching bottom howitzers, no matter how I shifted on my wooden desk chair.
Finally, after my biggest squeaker yet, my coiffed, old-maidish sign language interpreter mustered the nerve to say, “That’s enough. Hush.”
It hit me like a hammer: they hear me. My deaf parents, sisters, and school teachers had never warned me. I knew farts could smell like a cow farm in August, but that they could be loud? I thought “silent but deadly” was just another way of saying “fart.” Turns out it’s just one point on a surprisingly complex spectrum.
The third-grade me was mortified to realize my new classmates hadn’t been staring because sign language was interesting.
As someone once wrote, nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.
What they didn’t say is the same holds for hearing kids at deaf basketball camps, mainstreamed deaf kids in elementary school, and the last member of my family to get their thumb on their forehead.
Brendan Stern 
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