By This is a narrative role-play where I overlay my knowledge and experience of stuttering as remembered from my childhood with how I imagine my son is internalizing his perceptions. It is a perspective that is regularly top-of-mind as I go through the days with him and try to understand how he’s thinking about the way he talks. The examples used are true, recreated anecdotes he has shared with me from the backseat during our five-minute drive home after school.
“M-M-Michael, M-M-Michael, M-M-Michael, what do you think of my leg muscle?” I ask assertively, but he didn’t hear me. I’ll ask him another time. Let me see if the group of friends over at the craft table want to play.
“Ca-Ca-Ca-a-a-an I play you guys?” I ask. The friends nod as they continue tracing shapes with markers and talk back and forth amongst themselves. I want to say how beautiful their pictures are, but they are talking faster than I can keep up. “Mariah, that’s a beau-beau…” I start again, “Maa-Mariah…” Ughh, I can’t get their attention. More forcefully, “Maa-Mariah, that’s a beau-beau-u-u-tiful picture,” I say, though she doesn’t hear me. I’ll just finish coloring my picture and wait for daddy to pick me up, it’s almost 4:45. Tomorrow I can tell the friends that their pictures are beautiful.
“Okay friends, feel free to draw or work on your tracing at the craft table,” I hear the teacher say to the class. I run to get a good spot at the table, grab my favorite red and blue crayons, and start tracing with Henry, Carolyn, and Marilyn. Let me finish this house and tree and I’ll go show Henry. “He-He-Hen-ry, wa-wa-wa-wa-aa-aa-aant to see my drawing?” I ask him as he colors and talks to Marilyn, holding it up for him to see. Henry nudges me away immediately. I ask again but get the same nudge. “W-W-W-W-Why…” but I get stuck and can’t ask him fast enough why he is pushing me away. I just want him to say it’s beautiful.
“How was your day today, buddy?” daddy asks. He always asks after he buckles me into my seat. “It was a great day, actually it was kind of a bad day for me,” I say. I’m going to tell him what happened with Henry.
“Henry pushed me away today,” I say.
“Oh no, what happened?” daddy asks.
“I started talking to him twice and he pushed me away both times and I fell down,” I say, trying to keep daddy’s attention.
“Why did he push you?” daddy asks.
“I-I-I think he probably wanted some space,” I say.
“Did you ask him why he did that?” daddy asks.
“I did, but when I tried to ask him, I couldn’t ask him fast enough for him to hear me,” I say.
As a parent who doesn’t stutter, it would be easy to miss the nuance and complexities of your child’s internalization of these interactions between pre-school classmates. Within this series of brief interactions, his ability to say what he wanted, when and how he wanted was disrupted by his stuttering and how fast the communication needed to go to keep up with the moment.
You can see how he processed what happened. The missed connections, particularly with Henry was about not being able to say what he wanted fast enough. And then he stretched the truth by saying he fell down twice when he was pushed away, probably thinking that would get more of a reaction from us, which it did. When he told his mom the story at home some of the details changed. He doesn’t yet know that I am hyper-vigilant to the way he tells his stories because of my attentiveness to his stuttering, but it is second nature for me to deeply listen to the way he says things to help tailor my response to each situation, interaction and stuttered word.
This was two days’ worth of slighted interactions, and only a short samplings from much longer days. Play these scenarios out across the full days, weeks, months, and years still to come, and you can begin to see how important it is to influence the narratives of how he will perceive these small yet impactful slights to how he internalizes his relationship with stuttering. That’s the level of granularity with which we’re thinking about it. Not to micro-manage, but to ensure he is processing instead of ruminating, and building the right kind of resilience.
Every Waking Moment 