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Authors: Jeanne Marie Laskas
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told me that going on vacation wasn’t the same once you were a mom, but I think she held back telling me the whole thing. Her husband, Jack, is a good father, and so is my husband. These are not the type of men to go off to the casino or even to put back bourbons. They are “family” men who want nothing more than to be right there in family mode, sticking always by our sides. Even so, it always comes back to the mother to keep the kids from getting bitten by crabs or scorched by the sun or electrocuted by putting their fingers in the sockets of the little speakers put around so the vacationers can enjoy calypso music.
In Aruba, Sasha wore a pink bikini with pictures of turtles on it. She wasn’t talking yet but I wasn’t worried. When people asked me how old she was, I said two, leaving out the “and a half” part, and I think that little slip, that omission, was probably a good indicator of the denial I was in. Kids at two and a half are supposed to have a vocabulary of about three hundred words. Sasha had seven, but only if you really stretched it. She had three reliable sounds: “Ma,” meaning “Mom,” “Dat,” meaning “Dad,” and “Iss,” meaning “this,” and which she would use while pointing to get whatever she needed. “Iss” was a refined version of her former “sss” sound she would use as her one and only all-purpose word.
No, I told myself, I really wasn’t worried. After all, Anna hadbeen very slow to talk, too. Anna said nothing but “ch” for an entire year. I was used to this, to Lisa, the speech therapist who would come to our house with her Pooh toys two times a week and clap as Anna learned new sounds. Plenty of kids who come out of orphanages from China don’t have speech delays at all, but plenty do. Lisa had seen her share. Her theory was simple and shared by many of those experts who write in language-acquisition journals: disruption at about a year old is at a critical stage in language development—the very time the child is starting to mimic the people in the world around her. So, imagine, one day it’s all music and tone and
ee-ow
, and then, bam, the next it’s a strange nasal mess of clicks and clacks. The development shuts down, while the pathways in the brain rejigger themselves. But soon enough, with patience and some speech therapy to boost and encourage, language emerges again, and anew.
By the time Anna was three she was well on her way to speaking, although her path to language was the weirdest Lisa and her colleagues had ever observed. Rather than imitating sounds, the key for Anna was the alphabet. The actual symbols. She loved those things. We’d be at the grocery store and see a sign for grapes and Anna would run up and point. “G!” she’d say, looking at the sign and giving me a look of “Can you believe it? G is here!”
The symbols were her friends. When Lisa couldn’t get her to say “ball,” she finally picked up a block with a “B” on it. “Buh buh buh,” she said, pointing to the letter. That got Anna’s attention. (“Yay! B is here!”) And so she would mimic “buh” andthat got her revved up to go all the way into “ball.” And so came word after word.
I was eager for Anna to speak because I felt she would have so much to say. I felt I would get to know her better when she finally had a spoken form for her thoughts. What, anyway, is a person without language? Who is a girl with nothing more to offer than “ch” or “sss”?
When Anna finally started talking, the thing I learned was how much she loved the alphabet, the actual symbols, and she also loved numbers, the actual symbols, she loved them in blue and in pink and in red and in combinations aplenty.
The thing is, she was the same girl she was when all she said was “ch.” She was just… a little more so. She was growing up and into herself. I’m not convinced words changed anything, even though the thought disappoints me. I wanted language to be the key, not
In Aruba, Sasha wore a pink bikini with pictures of turtles on it. She wasn’t talking yet but I wasn’t worried. When people asked me how old she was, I said two, leaving out the “and a half” part, and I think that little slip, that omission, was probably a good indicator of the denial I was in. Kids at two and a half are supposed to have a vocabulary of about three hundred words. Sasha had seven, but only if you really stretched it. She had three reliable sounds: “Ma,” meaning “Mom,” “Dat,” meaning “Dad,” and “Iss,” meaning “this,” and which she would use while pointing to get whatever she needed. “Iss” was a refined version of her former “sss” sound she would use as her one and only all-purpose word.
No, I told myself, I really wasn’t worried. After all, Anna hadbeen very slow to talk, too. Anna said nothing but “ch” for an entire year. I was used to this, to Lisa, the speech therapist who would come to our house with her Pooh toys two times a week and clap as Anna learned new sounds. Plenty of kids who come out of orphanages from China don’t have speech delays at all, but plenty do. Lisa had seen her share. Her theory was simple and shared by many of those experts who write in language-acquisition journals: disruption at about a year old is at a critical stage in language development—the very time the child is starting to mimic the people in the world around her. So, imagine, one day it’s all music and tone and
ee-ow
, and then, bam, the next it’s a strange nasal mess of clicks and clacks. The development shuts down, while the pathways in the brain rejigger themselves. But soon enough, with patience and some speech therapy to boost and encourage, language emerges again, and anew.
By the time Anna was three she was well on her way to speaking, although her path to language was the weirdest Lisa and her colleagues had ever observed. Rather than imitating sounds, the key for Anna was the alphabet. The actual symbols. She loved those things. We’d be at the grocery store and see a sign for grapes and Anna would run up and point. “G!” she’d say, looking at the sign and giving me a look of “Can you believe it? G is here!”
The symbols were her friends. When Lisa couldn’t get her to say “ball,” she finally picked up a block with a “B” on it. “Buh buh buh,” she said, pointing to the letter. That got Anna’s attention. (“Yay! B is here!”) And so she would mimic “buh” andthat got her revved up to go all the way into “ball.” And so came word after word.
I was eager for Anna to speak because I felt she would have so much to say. I felt I would get to know her better when she finally had a spoken form for her thoughts. What, anyway, is a person without language? Who is a girl with nothing more to offer than “ch” or “sss”?
When Anna finally started talking, the thing I learned was how much she loved the alphabet, the actual symbols, and she also loved numbers, the actual symbols, she loved them in blue and in pink and in red and in combinations aplenty.
The thing is, she was the same girl she was when all she said was “ch.” She was just… a little more so. She was growing up and into herself. I’m not convinced words changed anything, even though the thought disappoints me. I wanted language to be the key, not
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