Kiera: Mom, have you seen my lifesaver?
Me: Your lifesaver?
Kiera: No, my lifesaver.
Me: We don’t have any lifesavers.
Kiera: No! Lifesaver! You know, “vmmm, vmmmm” *mimics sword waving*
Me: Ohhh, your lightsabre. No, I haven’t. Say lightsabre.
Kiera: I’m trying! *sigh* I miss my teeth.
Most parents talk of their children’s mispronunciation of various words and laugh about it, get a kick out of it, find it funny, because they’re kids and they’ll grow out of it and, in most cases, it’s cute. However, those same mispronunciations have always elicited the exact opposite reaction from me. They’ve often left me feeling depressed, worried, and sometimes downright angry. Other parents try not to let their kids see them laugh when they say a word wrong. Me, I try not to take out my frustrations around her or let her see my tears. When your kid has a speech delay (a neurological issue in our case) those typical childhood mispronunciations are just one more thing to worry about and one more reminder that your kid faces an unusually uphill battle just to be able to communicate with other people.
It’s not something I write about often because, depsite various professionals telling us there’s nothing we could have done to prevent it, and despite the fact that they frequently commend us for doing all we can to help her, there is still a fair bit of guilt involved. It is irrational, yes, but I am her mother and this is something I cannot immediately fix and couldn’t prevent. It is a struggle from which I could not protect her.
It doesn’t help, either, that certain people in my life have gone so far as to accuse me, very loudly, and very adamenty, of being the cause of that speech delay, even though I know that medically, this is not at all the case. However, even knowing that those claims are nothing but the unsubstantiated rantings of a boisterous and stubborn idiot, the words still stung. The cut deep and, truth be told, probably hurt me more than anything anyone else has ever said to me.
So that guilt, as unfounded as it may be, is likely something I will always feel.
It is surprising to me, then, that I would ever find myself in this situation.
Finally, and with a huge sigh of relief, after three long years of speech therapy, I can laugh about this one. Lifesaver, I know, is only temporary. With her baby teeth falling out at an alarming rate over the holiday break, Kiera’s a little, shall we say, gappy-in-the-mouth at the moment. Under normal circumstances (like when she actually has a mouth full of teeth), her pronunciation of most things is really good now, given where we started, and I am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
