By “Some friends were making fun of me today, mama.” My son’s words caught my attention from across the room as I was making dinner. “What does ‘making fun of’ mean?” he asked. As I heard the question, I knew he was trying to tell us something that had happened at school that day, but he wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to say. I stopped what I was doing to listen as he kept talking.
“I was still talking, and my friends were talking over me, and they wouldn’t let me finish.”
Time pressure.
They were just being kids, excited to talk and interact with him. This is how it begins, and I felt it viscerally. I sensed his frustration, knowing it wasn’t the first time he experienced it. But it was the first time he told us. Or was it?
As with everything else in life that frustrates us, there are many small—and sometimes big—things that occur and we develop adverse reactions when similar instances happen again. Until…they become triggers. For stutterers, time pressure evolves in the same way, even if it appears to start all at once. Suddenly, those who spend enough time with him—aside from us, his parents—are talking over him, cutting off his thoughts, or finishing his words and sentences because he is a fraction too slow to keep up with the moment.
This wasn’t the first time. He’s been pushing back, physically and with his words. On several occasions, he has called out mama, saying, “It’s my turn to talk.” As I’ve said before, she and him typically hold the floor in our house. In another instance just before this day, he hit Mimi—his grandma, my mom—on the arm while we were eating dinner because everyone was excitedly talking but he felt his voice was being infringed upon. “I’m still talking, Mimi!” he said. No one ever means any harm by it.
I see and feel these moments with such depth because of how this pressure can gradually infect your minute-to-minute reality. And as his father, I desperately want to shield him from knowing that, and allowing it to get to a point where he internalizes the narrative of “just f*cking wait for me!” Or worse, shutting down his vibrant personality because that is what perceiving the pressure of time does to many who stutter.
In this moment, I held back from rushing in to influence his processing of it despite urgent looks from my wife to do so. I’m the default stuttering whisperer. I needed her to stay in the fire, so he knows we’re both there to help repair. When I finally joined the conversation, I didn’t say what I wanted. I opted for the usual “that happens to daddy all the time.” I told the truth—it happens on a regular basis in my daily interactions but with the instances being more of a barely-recognizable blip on the reactivity radar.
The next day, I felt a sense of urgency that maybe now might be the time to tell him that he stutters. I couldn’t focus on much else. I knew that eventually there would be a moment like this that would compel me to explain that the way he talks is different, okay, and like daddy.
Not yet…
There was an equal force holding me back. But we’re close. I know he knows the way he talks is different, but he doesn’t know that others—from others—that it is not okay, bad, or should be fixed. Ultimately, that is what is guiding our decision. There are no signs that he is slinking back into himself.
It has given me the time to figure out what I’m going to say to him, and how I will teach him to assertively yet politely advocate for the space I want him to take back. “I stutter, so I’m still talking…”
In time.
Every Waking Moment 