If you had a hard time sobering up, try adding deafness to the equation.

That´s what Laurel W. and other deaf and hard of hearing people have to work through to gain sobriety. It took Laurel years before she made it, and she had "advantages" that others didn´t. She is not totally deaf, and for most of her life, relied on lip reading and powerful hearing aids to struggle through school all the way to a master´s degree in special education. It was not until 1979 that she decided she needed to learn sign language.

"My life was miserable,. and I thought my unhappiness was due to my deafness," Laurel said. "Looking down Broadway (on Capitol Hill), I saw people signing (as the deaf call it) and decided I needed to address that part of my life. Later, meeting other deaf people, I learned more about who I was as a deaf person.

"It was an amazing revelation to learn how much I was missing before I learned to sign. Lip reading, you only understand about 30 per cent of what´s being said." Laurel learned to sign at Seattle´s Hearing, Speech and Deafness Center, when she was hired as a counselor in the Living Skills program. She was still drinking then, and in denial about her alcoholism.

But we´re getting ahead of the story. Laurel was born into a huge family of Christian Reformed Dutch-Americans in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "My mother´s seven brothers and sisters all lived within four blocks of each other, and there were lots of uncles who were ministers. It was a very noisy family," a condition which was especially difficult for a girl who was hard of hearing. The life style was conservative and self-reliant. "If anybody had a drinking problem, it was kept well hidden because it would mean you were without will power. Marriages were supposed to last for life. Only sinners overindulged." But Laurel says, at least where liquor wasconcerned, it didn´t work that way."One uncle, when he´d had a few drinks before dinner, you could expect a prayer to be at least 10 minutes long." In the summer, the whole clan migrated to the shores of Lake Michigan for a month. In the evening, the adults had what they called happy hour, "but us kids called it the crabby hour."

Laurel was first fitted with hearing aids when she was four years old, but there was never a suggestion that she learn to sign. She was lucky enough to attend a Christian Reformed school which had small classes, so she was able to get much individual attention. She did well in subjects where the teacher faced the class, but poorly in math because the teacher´s back was to her.

"I had a difficult time accepting my deafness. I knew no other deaf people as I was growing up." But she hid her disability from her classmates, who thought she was going to art classes when she went to speech therapy. At 20, Laurel decided to strike out on her own. She got a job in San Jose with the same firm she had worked for in Grand Rapids, and immediately started kicking over the traces. "I got into drugs and alcohol very quickly," and when she turned 21, an "old geezer" took her to to the Playboy Club in San Francisco. "I couldn´t stand the man, but the drinks were free," she remembered. She also toured the Haight-Ashbury and did some pot there, but this was the late Sixties. She found the hippie scene to be past its prime.

It was all too much for the Dutch girl from Grand Rapids. "I was scared at what was happening to me. I was losing control, so I moved back home after two years in California." Within three months, she had married a youth who passed the family test-Dutch and a member of the church. "But the family forgot to ask if he ever went to church, which he didn´t."

The young couple moved to Kentucky, where Laurel earned her master´s degree in special education and experimented, with her husband, with "the open marriage thing" which was all the rage in those days. The experiment didn´t work out and the marriage ended. Laurel didn´t want to tell her parents, so she followed her ex-husband to Seattle and settled in on Capitol Hill. "Some years later, when my mother found out I was divorced, she said he was never right for me anyway because he never went to church." (Laurel had stopped too, but recently has been tiptoeing back, attending services where signing is provided.)

That was in 1975, and her life quickly spun out of control. "I worked, but I spent all my spare time in a tavern on Capitol Hill, where I met people who referred me to doctors who would prescribe whatever I wanted--Valium, Percodan, whatever. And there was cheap marijuana just around the corner. I thought it was a great life, but actually, I was miserable."

She worked her way through a series of disastrous relationships before she met the man who scared her into her first contact with Alcoholics Anonymous. "When he was bingeing, I was afraid he´d hurt me, so I went to a counseling service that specialized in alcoholism. ´I have this boyfriend who drinks too much,´ I told him. He asked me to fill out a questionnaire about my own drinking, but I insisted I wasn´t there for me."

He managed to persuade her to try out a couple of meetings. One of them was Old Fremont. "I told ´em I was just visiting," and they said, ´that´s okay, Laurel, come back." She wasn´t ready yet-this was 1978-but she decided if she ever did join AA, Fremont would be a good place to come to. During this time, Laurel held a variety of jobs, including a six-year stint at the Hearing, Speech and Deafness Center, before she got the job that finally brought her to her knees. In 1985, she was invited to become the founding director of the Deaf-Blind Service Center in Seattle. "I learned real fast and I burned out real fast," she recalled. "I was trying to please everyone-three sponsoring state agencies, the staff, the board of directors, the clients and the clients´ parents.

"I was absolutely miserable. It was the most stressful, high pressure job I´ve ever had, and I didn´t have the people skills to cope with all the demands. I´m proud of the fact I started that agency from scratch, but I didn´t have what it took to keep going. When I got home, I´d hit the bottle."

She hid her drinking, but only with great good luck. "A couple of times, I found my car parked on the lawn and wondered how it got there. Fortunately, I never killed anybody, but I should have been caught many times."

After 15 months, she was asked to resign, a humiliation for which she is now very grateful because "it speeded up my path to the bottom." Her last day of work was Dec. 1, 1986. Still in denial, she was seeing a therapist for what she believed were emotional problems. But the therapist said, "Laurel, if you want to continue with me, you have to face up to your drinking." "I was furious, but she introduced me to another woman who she had confronted about alcoholism. She told me, ´ I gotta go to a meeting too, and I can sign´ So when I woke up on Christmas Day 1986, I decided I´d give the best gift I can ever give myself, and go to AA. That´s how Dec. 25 became my birthday.

"I remember the next six months vividly. I took a lot of naps. Between meetings, I would lie on the floor in the fetal position. I didn´t want to drink anymore, and I was so afraid." There were no signed meetings in those days. Laurel would seek out small meetings and move around the room, reading lips. As time went on, she began to campaign for signed meetings. Unemployed, she received block grant money from the city of Seattle that paid for two hours of interpreter service a month. Pooling her grant with two other deaf people, they got the total up to six hours a month.

Then the grant money ran out, and the troubling question of outside aid arose. The women-only meeting she´d been attending then passed around a second basket to continue paying for interpretation.

Over time, Laurel evolved into an advocate for deaf and hard of hearing alcoholics. Money to pay for interpreters is an issue that never goes away. Groups do not want outside support, and often cannot or do not want to get into the struggle to raise the money themselves. Interpreters cost $40-$45 an hour, and often require a two-hour minimum-serious money for most groups.

Nevertheless, at this writing, there are signed meetings every day of the week except Thursday in the greater Seattle area, and on Thursday, there´s one in Tacoma. The schedule changes often, so Laurel prepares a monthly calendar of deaf and hard of hearings meetings that is mailed out to anyone interested. There´s also a web site, WWW.DHH12S.com, managed by a Corvallis woman, that has schedules of deaf meetings for the entire country.

With sobriety, life has continued to evolve. Laurel taught classes for the deaf and hard of hearing at Seattle Central Community College for eight years. She met her present husband in AA, and has been happily married for 12 years. Currently, she´s a substitute teacher and has her own business tutoring deaf adults.

"Sometimes," she reflected, "I think the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR) hired me just to be a role model-a happy person who´s enjoying herself even though she can´t hear very well."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.