Speech Therapy

We speak a code language at our house.  It is an alphabet without L's, PH's, J's, F's, TH's, sometimes R's, or multi-syllable words.  And let me tell you-I am quite fluent in this vernacular.  It rivals Spanish as my next best language.

While it is good that I know "Pa push da bunt!" means "Phil(the dog) pushed the button on the remote and made the volume go off.", but at 28-months, it is time to help the world understand my son. 

This Thursday, he will be evaluated for speech therapy.  I am both very excited and inexplicably hesitant.  Since he was born, he has been free to be himself.  We have not cut his hair, pushed him toward an interest, prompted him to decide if he is going to be left or right handed.  He has just been his own choosing.  In so many ways my husband and I have shaped him in to the little man that he is, but it happened organically and without an agenda.  Now we are letting someone else in.  And it feels strange.

I am the one who pushed for him to be tested.  Many kind people in our lives encouraged us that he would grow out of it and be fine in a few years.  It isn't a bad theory, lots of kids do manage it alone.  But until these people have been here on a 12 time out kind of morning.  Until they have listened to my son yell the same things over and over until he starts hitting because no one knows what he is saying.  Until they have heard the garbled speech for an entire car ride home from daycare and not understood a dang word of it, it seems unfair to make such a claim.

I believe in interventions. I am a teacher for crying out loud! Do you know how many meetings I have sat in, where a parent was informed that their child was in need of intervention?  Do I suddenly know how they feel? Yes.

It isn't shame.  It isn't embarrassment.  It isn't really sadness, though my eyes disagree.  It is the heartbreak of feeling like a helpless parent.  Of knowing how the multitude of sacrifices made since pregnancy, just weren't quite enough.  Not that those were in vain, but that according to some measure against others, against the "norm", something may be broken and I can't fix it.  


*Update*

We had the evaluation.  We learned two things:
1. He is definitely marble mouthed and the doctor did not understand all the things that my son said, but his mouth is able to make all the phonemic sounds.  Even though there are several letters missing from his alphabet now, he is physiologically able to make them, and he will.
2. He wants to talk like other people he hears- 4+ word sentences, multi-syllable words, etc, so he uses "jargon" (nonsense words) to fill in the spaces between words he can say to feel confident in his speech.   All this time we couldn't understand him, but a good bit of the time, they weren't words in the first place.
3. There is no obvious indication that he will mature through the speech stages at any significant lag from the norm.
4. I feel sadness that I projected a problem onto my child by comparing him against the world.
5. My child, speech impaired or not, is a wondrous being that delights my heart.



If you would like to know more about speech stages, this link may be of use to you.
http://www.children.gov.on.ca/htdocs/English/topics/earlychildhood/speechlanguage/brochure_speech.aspx