Cathy Shields

My name is Cat. I am 47 and married. I have been interested in ASL for a while. I come from a city (Olathe, KS) that has a large deaf community. I feel that ASL is a more helpful language to learn than spoken languages, because there are phone translators available for spoken languages. I have had success using signs to help my foster sons learn to talk. I had a two year old who went from grunting and head-butting to "mimi eat me" I am currently building my vocabulary for my granddaughter and myself. I know this sounds weird, but I have an inner child who is mute. I don't have multiple personalities, but I do feel like there are pieces of me that got stuck at certain ages, because of childhood trauma. The littlest one (I call her sweet pea), is from before I started talking at age 3. I am teaching myself lullabyes and words like "sleep" and "safe" to learn to express that part of myself. Please don't be offended if you do not believe in this. I realize it may be cultural appropriation. I just want to be able to open up that part of myself so I can heal. Also, when I return to Olathe, I want to be able to hold better conversations than just "please" and "thank you" with members of the deaf community. I would like to eventually be able to translate as a volunteer.

Is it true that someone else who speaks ASL needs to give you a name sign? What do you do when you don't have an ASL speaker available? Like when you are learning sign to help a small child.