In the deaf community, some feel that cued speech, like cochlear implants, threatens deaf culture because they believe it arises from a medical model of deafness, through which deafness is perceived as an undesirable trait that needs to be treated or cured. A “social model,” on the other hand, suggests that the environment must adapt to the deaf person, whose “natural language” is sign language. The educators even asked my parents to consider sending me to their residential program, where, surrounded by fluent signers, I would absorb sign language at a faster pace and have full exposure to deaf culture. They believed that, as long as I had a strong command of sign language as a first language, I would have the foundation necessary to acquire English later on.

My mother was stumped. On the one hand, she didn’t know if cued speech would work, but desperately wanted to succeed at finding a way to communicate with me quickly and effectively. On the other hand, she didn’t want me to be alienated from the deaf community. My father, however, was resolute: He would not send his child away. Together, they decided the promise of cued speech was worth the risk for at least a year at the nearby public school. If it didn’t work out, they would have the deaf school’s residential program as a fallback option.

Today, I’m a 30-year-old who wears hearing aids, never attended a residential deaf school, and who can sign proficiently, but not fluently. I attended public schools, surpassed most of my hearing peers in reading ability, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in creative writing, married a hearing man, and work as a full-time freelance writer. Yet despite my father’s insistent confidence — “I have zero regrets,” he often tells me — I’ll never know definitively whether my parents made the right decision.

Throughout my life, I’ve felt like the object of a constant tug of war between the deaf and hearing communities. Although I’m rewardingly self-employed, married and highly literate, I still struggle in hearing-centric environments. I have to remind my husband more frequently than I would like to turn his head so that his lips aren’t obscured while we’re out with his family at dinner, or to cue what he’s saying. Well-meaning hearing people frequently insult me with “compliments” about how well I’ve assimilated, like, “I can barely tell you’re deaf!” (We call comments like these “audist”— akin to “racist” or “sexist” — because they assume deaf people like me must speak aloud and sound like a hearing person to be deemed fortunate or successful.)

On the other hand, when I spend time with deaf friends, I’m often chided by them for not being more fluent in sign language, or otherwise embracing a more culturally deaf way of life. According to them, I’ve succumbed to audism by using my voice to speak more often than my hands, and cued speech to absorb information. All this, despite performing in deaf theater throughout childhood, and, during my college years, taking sign language at Gallaudet; interning as a sports reporter covering United States soccer and swimming at the 2009 Deaflympics in Taipei, Taiwan; interning at the National Association of the Deaf; and, after graduate school, cofounding an online, intersectional journal of deaf and disability literature and art called The Deaf Poets Society. Right now, I can’t be deaf without drawing criticism from somebody.

I still hold out hope that the deaf and hearing communities will come to a compromise. One Maryland-based, deaf native cuer, Amy Crumrine, believes she has the answer: through her national nonprofit organization, CueSign, she is promoting an approach that involves both cued speech and sign language. Founded in 1998, the organization provides resources to several stakeholders — educational programs, organizations and families of deaf children — in the service of “manual bilingualism.”

Amy met with me recently in a coffee shop in Bethesda, Md., to discuss her project. During the interview, we transitioned seamlessly between sign language and cued speech, and, as we commiserated over the tensions between the hearing, deaf and cued speech communities, she repeatedly asserted that the one thing that matters most in raising deaf children is language access. “I strongly believe in a family foundation,” she said. “It’s important for the child to be able to communicate with parents. Find a way. Whether it’s cueing or signing.”