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Different

Could you imagine if somebody traveled back in time to that moment and went up to us and said, “Hey, you two are going to be some of the best basketball players to ever pick up a basketball?” We’d be like, “What?”

Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers

I don’t know why I thought I might go unnoticed, but I hoped since our school was brand-new in Abilene, Texas, no one would make a fuss over how my brother and sister and I were new too.

It’s no use thinking you can slip into obscurity when you already stand out. I didn’t look or talk like the other kids at Reagan Elementary School. It wasn’t just that I was the new girl from another city. I was the new girl from overseas, from Italy, and yet not Italian. I was a United States citizen, with a mom from Texas, and yet not at all steeped in Texas culture. The only thing I understood about being in the Lone Star state was being lone.

I wore glasses and these brown, matchbox-sized amplifying devices that fit behind each ear. A light brown plastic casing wrapped over the upper ear lobes and connected with tiny tubes to a clear, bulblike speaker that tucked inside each ear itself. I didn’t think much about wearing them. You get used to them, like glasses. I don’t remember not having them when I was young, so they were just a normal thing to me.

Until other kids made me aware that they weren’t. I was the only one in my class with items that made me look so different. I might have been wearing a sign that said “Something’s wrong with me.” My new classmates noticed, and they weren’t about to let anything different go without comment.

Kids can be so mean.

“What are those?” kid after kid asked on my first day of second grade. They pointed at my ears.

“Four eyes,” another kid said, snickering, pointing at my glasses.

For the first time I realized I was different. I’d worn the big box hearing aids as long as I could remember. My older brother, Kenyon, was also born with moderate hearing loss. It skipped Tauja, just twenty-one months older than me, and she was used to being our ears for us. She would make sure to repeat what we couldn’t quite make out and tell us what we never heard.

She became my voice too.

Ever shy, I’d learned to rely on Tauj to speak up for me. I felt completely safe and connected with her. Though we couldn’t be more different personality-wise, she understood me and looked out for me. She was the instigator, and I was more of a go-with-the-flow girl. I was prone to think more on something before digging into it, and while Tauj is a thinker too, she’s more likely to plunge right in, start a thing by doing it. Where I loved books and reading, was a tomboy, and kept to myself, not speaking much to people I didn’t know, Tauja could talk your ear off (and would), and played sports but loved playing with her dolls more.

So early on we became a team, balancing out one another. Where I would hold back, she bounded forward, fearless. Where I didn’t want to speak up, she spoke for me. What I couldn’t hear, she repeated and passed along. We felt at home with one another.

That was good—because home changed a lot for us.

We had moved across the country and the world almost as fast as the basketball our father, Harvey Catchings, dribbled down the court in the NBA. He played in the league from 1974 to 1985, beginning in Philadelphia for the 76ers, then for the Nets in New Jersey, where I was born, then Milwaukee for the Bucks, and a year in Los Angeles for the Clippers.

When he finished his pro career in the NBA, we all wondered where we were going to go next. We were told we weren’t just going to move to another city. We were going to move overseas. And I remember thinking, There’s a world outside of the USA?

Dad was going to play for an Italian team, Segafredo. We moved to a little town called Gorizia, in the northeast corner of Italy, about a day’s drive from Venice. This would be the fourth home I could remember. I was just seven.

The Italian league Dad played in featured some former NBA basketball players, including a guy named Joe who went by the nickname of “Jellybean” who had played with the 76ers the same years Dad had played in Philly, at the beginning of the team’s Julius Erving era. Of course, I didn’t know much yet about the NBA. I just knew my dad was a great basketball player who’d played with some other guys in the pros—this guy named Jellybean and some doctor. Dr. J.

Jellybean Bryant’s family was living there also, and we got to know them well that year. His wife, Pam, was real nice, and they had two girls, Sharia and Shaya. And a boy by the name of Kobe.

Kobe Bryant.

We played with each other. We did sightseeing together. We had so much in common—not only English and being American but we were African American families in a country that didn’t have many of “us.” Strangers in a strange land, our families developed a close relationship while we were there.

We were in Italy just a year before moving to Abilene. Later I would come to cherish that year and come to think of it as the last time I really felt free. In another time and place my childhood friendship with Kobe Bryant might have seemed pretty awesome to the kids at school in Abilene. But Kobe Bryant wasn’t “Kobe” to anyone yet.

And Tamika Catchings was still just an odd-looking girl with big box hearing aids over her ears.

Italy should have made my challenges the next year in Abilene, Texas, less surprising.

In Italy, I’d glimpsed what it was like to be an outsider. I’d begged my parents to let me learn Italian. Kobe spoke Italian. But my real reason was I wanted to understand what Italian people were saying at school and in our neighborhood. But Mom and Dad wanted me to master English first.

Wise enough, I suppose. My hearing disorder had also left me with a bit of a speech problem—a mild lisp, but enough to make me seem even more different to others. Mom and Dad wanted me to get better at speaking English, rather than confuse me with another language.

Once in Abilene, though, my “somewhat better English” didn’t help me with the other kids. That’s because there was a whole other language to learn here, the language of how to be accepted and acceptable. A language I didn’t know. So much of this language is unspoken, and though we’re all introduced to it, we can struggle all our lives to make peace with it.

Even though Tauj, in third grade, and Kenyon, in fifth, went to the same school and we sometimes could have lunch together, I mostly felt alone in Abilene.

Teachers didn’t help. Within the first couple of weeks of being set apart by other kids for how I looked and talked, I was set apart by the classes too. Someone decided, because I didn’t always hear my own voice well and struggled to hear and enunciate certain sounds, like in ch and sh and S words, that I should go to speech therapy class.

The first day the therapist came to our classroom, she walked right in on a lesson, interrupting our teacher, whispering in her ear. My teacher nodded toward me, and all eyes riveted to mine as she announced, “Tamika, you can go now.”

Go where? I wondered. I hadn’t been told about the speech therapy that would separate me two and three times a week from the other students. I didn’t know what to expect as I trailed the speech therapist out of the classroom, but I wanted to melt, disappear from all my classmates’ stares.

One boy groaned and asked what all the other kids must have been thinking: “Why do you get out of class?”

If any kids hadn’t thought I was so different before this, they did now.

I wound through the desks, past the stares, and down the hall after the speech therapist. I should have welcomed the escape. Instead, I wished I could stay back at my desk, unnoticed, to hear what everyone else was hearing, learn what everyone else was learning. I loved learning at school. I just didn’t like being set apart, standing out, and being put down.

Speech therapy classes became another form of weekly torment. The therapist was kind enough, but all through our sessions, she made me repeat certain sounds over and over. It was like she was teaching a baby to speak. Well, I wasn’t a baby. All the while I thought of my classmates getting to read books and write whole stories.

The teasing got worse. My wish to fit in became my prayer every new day of second grade in Abilene. Instead of kids getting used to my differences, they got used to tormenting me. One day it was about the glasses; the next, about the speech therapy classes that must have seemed mysterious and secret to them. Later it would be the braces put on my teeth.

Mostly it was about the awkward hearing aids.

I hated those hearing aids. I was grateful for how they enabled me to hear, but I couldn’t stand anyone commenting on them or staring at them. I couldn’t bear going to school, and then couldn’t wait to get home.

I knew Mom would be there. Our mom, Wanda, was always there.

Dinner would be in the making, ready for us after whatever recreational activity we had for the evening. But, she always had a snack ready for us when we got home. She’d sit with us at the table, hear about our day, help with homework, and share in the small victories and challenges that make up grade school: acing a test, getting more homework, dealing with classmates.

Her question was always the same when we walked into the kitchen where she’d be setting out the snacks: “How was school today?”

My response was the same. For three months, the same. “Please, Mom, please. Don’t make me go back.” I stared down at the table. “The kids say mean things. I can’t do that anymore.”

“Tamika.” She walked over to me and took my chin in her hand, turning my face toward hers. “You know you have to go to school. Ignore the bad things anyone says. You know what they’re saying isn’t true. There’s nothing wrong with you—you’ll get through this.” She smiled. “You can do anything you set your mind to do and work toward. The sky’s the limit.”

I leaned my head against her for a minute. I’d heard her loud and clear. Somewhere deep inside I knew what she said was true. I really did believe I could do what I set my mind to do.

I just wished there was a way I could show it and prove myself to the kids at school.