A couple of mornings after Christmas, I eased out of my parents’ guestroom bed before dawn, hoping I wouldn’t wake my wife. In the hallway, I tripped over our five-year-old son.
“What in the…”
I swallowed my words when I saw his tears.
“You left me,” he whispered. At his bedtime, I had laid down next to him until he had fallen asleep, then eased out of the room. When he woke, he’d come looking for me.
“Oh, Honey,” I gathered him in my arms and shuffled down the hall to the other guestroom. Dropping beside him in bed, I snuggled my arm around him. At his last checkup, he measured in the 95th percentiles in both height and weight for boys his age. But right then, he seemed so small.
~
This son weighed 10 lbs. at birth. The doctor greeted my parents in the waiting room: “Congratulations! He’s a toddler!” When he was only a few weeks old, well-intentioned people would lift him under his arms, assuming by his size that he was old enough to control his own neck. Our poor baby’s head would flop around.
But the changes in his young life have been even bigger and more stressful. Four weeks after his second birthday, his little sister was born. A month later, we moved to another state.
He has developed a speech dysfluency, a stutter. My wife and I scheduled an evaluation with our beloved pediatrician. She checked his ears, nose, and throat. Then she sat and listened as he carried on for 20 minutes about his adventures in the woods. Finally, our son took a deep breath: “Sometimes, I have trouble getting my words out.”
“But,” he added with a grin, “I’m perfectly fine.”
The doctor beamed at us on her way out: “What a cool kid.”
My wife and I have considered speech therapy. A friend’s daughter, who is our son’s age, has her appointments over a video conference call during the pandemic. We could arrange the same.
But our son’s dysfluency comes and goes for no apparent reasons. And my wife points out that he is learning how to manage it. He often takes a deep breath before speaking. Beginning with familiar phrases seems to help him:
“I have good news…”
“Just listen to this…”
“Dad? Don’t you know?”
We’ve noticed that he speaks more fluidly when neither he nor his listener is distracted. I work primarily from home now, but even when he interrupts, I try to give him my full attention and an encouraging smile.
My own mother is a speech language pathologist. She works with him regularly and also notes that he’s growing in other ways besides height and weight. Lately, he has coached his younger sister’s enunciation: “Say it this way…rrrrr-run.” She tries to repeat after her brother. She still says “w-un.” He shrugs: “You’ll get it. Don’t worry.”
She smiles: “I won’t worry.”
Despite what my wife and mother tell me, I do worry. Not as much about his speech as his self-esteem. This fall he will start school. If he must be pulled from the rest of his classmates to work with a speech language pathologist, then his confidence might suffer.
I know kids can be cruel. I certainly was.
~
My high school baseball teammates and I were merciless toward this particular kid because he stammered. We ridiculed him to his face, such as stuttering his name.
He sat the bench as an underclassman. But he worked hard and never complained. He said little of anything. He became one of our starting pitchers by his senior year. I don’t know what kind of coaching he received off the field, but his speech improved as well.
Whether his son pitched or not, his father watched from the bleachers behind home plate. Win or lose, he sported the same quiet smile at the end of the game as he draped his arm around his son’s shoulders and hefted his baseball bag with his other hand.
As much as I’m ashamed of my own behavior, I look back on that father with admiration. He knew his role was to be supportive. He knew what he could carry for his son and what he couldn’t.
But, damn, there must have been times when it was hard for him to watch.
“Dad?” my son often begins a sentence. “Don’t you know?” Then he proceeds to tell me whatever is on his mind. This can take some time. I feel myself growing impatient with him.
As a parent, how do you know when to intervene? I want to do right by all my children. When they were really young, the time to step-in was clearly defined. You stopped them from jumping off the bed or sticking a fork in the electrical socket. It becomes harder to know what to do as they grow older.
I know that even the best intentions may do more harm than good. If your child is going to learn independence and resilience, you need to hold back and let him figure things out when life throws him a curveball. You need to let go of your desire to control the outcome, even if he struggles. Maybe even if he suffers.
Damn, that’s hard for me to say.
I remember that teammate sat down next to me on the bench once before a game. He triple-knotted his baseball cleats. Catching my eye, he shrugged, “I like ’em extra tight. Just like my dad.”
I know you can hope your child carries something of you with him.
~
That early morning at my parents’ house, after I’d carried our son back to his bed, I laid down next to him once again, my arm resting across his chest in the dark. He mumbled something.
“What’s that, Honey?”
“Dad? Don’t you know? I want you to hold me tighter.”
Andrew Taylor-Troutman serves as poet pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, NC. His fourth book, Gently Between the Words, was published in 2019.