By There is no alternative. As time stands still, my heart stops, awareness heightens, hearing narrows, and I physically turn towards my son as I detect that he is about to speak. No matter what I’m doing or where I may be, he gets my undivided, hypervigilant attention. The seconds between first detection and the beginning of his voice, there is a pervasive felt experience that arises in an attempt to buffer the impact from the reverberations of his stutter, every time he speaks.
I’m not afraid to say that this feeling is attributed to the frequency and severity of his stuttering pattern. Over the last year-and-a-half, he has worked his way through every kind of stutter and pattern imaginable, from vowel prolongations to repetitions to hard blocks and even the most free-flowing, beautiful stuttering I’ve ever heard in my life. And my wife and I have given him the space to ride the rollercoaster at his own pace. We could not ask for a more resilient child.
But my anticipation of his stutter and how he will work his way through his words has created a physiological reaction to help defend me against the emotional pain of watching and listening to him struggle.
I have no way of describing it other than it feels like a wince—the recoiling that your body naturally does to brace for impending harm. For me, it is not just his stutter that has led to this inner reactivity. The years of high anxiety and stress that ravaged my defenses primed them to develop this kind of coping mechanism. My mind and body don’t want to go back to that barely functioning degree of hypervigilance. But here we are.
So, what is the experience actually like to stay present there in each moment with him as he needs me? The recoiling inside is a heavyweight boxing match between states of consciousness, trading blows of presence and dissociation, no matter what we are doing together. From reading bedtime stories to driving, once he begins to stutter, it takes everything in me to stay present and withstand the pain.
There are many times when it is too much to bear, and the pain takes me away from the moment. Imagine reading to your child. They are sitting in your lap, and you work your way through the book while also navigating your own openly stutter-filled speech. And they are pointing out animals or cars on the pages and stuttering with some struggle as you continue reading. You feel the wince come on and then suddenly you are reading the last few words of the book. You were reading. Your child was actively engaged in the book. But you have no recollection of the last ten pages aside from the fact that you’ve read it 20 times before. You were literally pulled from the moment and awoken at the end of the book. It is such a scary feeling to experience.
“Come on, come on, come on buddy, get through it,” is what I say to myself to ward off the wince. I’m silently cheering him on while trying to stand there emotionless, so he doesn’t pick up my distress. His eyes dart away from mine. He does his signature hand movements as the words escape. I’m holding strong, thinking “don’t break, he needs you.” Time truly stands still, eternity-like, though its only but a few seconds.
Since he always works his way through his words, the release of his voice is an emotional dance of jumping up and down excitement tempered by an overwhelming guilt that feels like “look what I’ve passed on to him.” I want and know I need to tip the scales to the elation side and show him it, but I’m not there yet.
When he goes to bed each night, I’m drained emotionally and physically from holding up the façade of support that that he so desperately needs. I’m exhausted. Very often, a wicked headache settles in that keeps me from doing much of anything. I fight to keep my thoughts from going to the dark place of thinking he will have the same journey through stuttering that I did. And then I try to sleep myself.
Tomorrow is always a new fight to hold his space. He deserves it.
Every Waking Moment 