Speech Therapy

Perhaps I should have known it was coming when Sam said to me, “the gelagen seet got caught in the acheen.”

One day while picking Sam up from school, Miss Melissa, Sam’s teacher at the Mouse House, stopped me before I wrangled Sam out of the door. She stopped me to tell me that she thought Sam needed speech therapy along with some occupational therapy (to hold his pencil properly). Sam is young for preschool just making the cut off with a December 22nd birthday so I had already decided to wait a year before sending him off to kindergarten (plus, I don’t want him going off to college at 17 years old).

Miss Melissa didn’t know any of this and I was going to tell her after she finished talking but she was geared up. I wasn’t worried about what she was saying as much as I felt for her. I could tell that her favorite part of her job wasn’t telling a mom that her Perfect Patty is imperfectly pronouncing her p’s and q’s. She had the forced calm of someone at street level with a bullhorn gently trying to talk someone off a ledge. Maybe it was because of that and because she was telling me all the services would be free and provided at the school that I suddenly felt like the author David Sedaris’s mom. Whenever a teacher came to her home to tell her about David problems, she promptly offered the teacher scotch after scotch. I almost said, “Well Dear, if it doesn’t cost anything and I don’t have to drive anywhere, bring it on. And by the way, do you drink Dewers?”

And maybe I’m a bit cavalier about it all because my friend Shannon’s son Conor has been going to speech therapy for years and it seems such a fixable problem. Recently she asked Conor’s speech therapist if her daughter Emma could get speech therapy too. Emma sounds as if she grew up on the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port. But the speech therapist told Shannon, “Oh we don’t do Rs until the age of 8.” I guess Rs are much more sophisticated and perhaps a bit more optional than other letters. If you roll the R in Regatta you might not get asked back to Martha's Vineyard.

I knew it would be easy to get Sam to comply just by saying, “Conor has a speech therapist too” (Conor being the arbiter of what is permissible—in Sam’s head). I began to wonder and worry though when my brain had started decoding. How often is he misunderstood or not heard? I decode so quickly and very rarely need to say to Sam, “what was that?” or “can you say that differently?”. When he had said “the gelagen seet got caught in the acheen” it sounded exactly the same to me as “the skeleton’s feet got caught in the machine.” Ouch.