Sometimes I fear I paint too rosy a picture here of what our life is like, or that I talk so much about how alike Linc is that people wonder if I notice how different he is, too. I’ll be the first to admit that every day isn’t easy. We aren’t living in a dreamland where we have imagined away Linc’s DS. It’s just that most days it’s only a small piece of the puzzle for us, not the big picture.
But some days, it becomes magnified. Some days his differences take over our field of vision like they’ve been hit with a high power zoom. Sometimes my fear of how the world will treat him swells up and becomes this palpable thing, like a body here in the room with me, breathing and taking up space right along beside me. Once in a while, though I know better, I start to think about Linc in typical terms and it sends me into a panic. He’s four years old and can’t really speak yet. When will he be potty trained? How long will we have to use gates to keep him from falling down the stairs and a baby monitor to make sure he hasn’t had an attack of croup in the night?
I had a moment like that the other night. Linc and I had gone to our Tuesday night church group without Sam and Nico because Nico had been sent home from school with a fever that afternoon. One of Linc’s friends came in said that Linc was signing something no one understood, and I told him that Linc was asking for water. Now normally, Nico is there with us on Tuesday nights to help translate, but without his brother to speak his special brand of sign language, Linc was wandering around trying desperately to get anyone to understand his request. Linc uses a distorted version of many of the baby sign language signs either because he can’t do the real version or because he has gotten lazy over time and opted for a rough estimate of the actual sign, so even if someone there had known sign language, they still wouldn’t have understood his version. He literally speaks a language only three people in the world know (Sam, Nico, and I), and even we don’t understand him all the time.
It was such a small thing, and Linc wasn’t particularly upset, but it just got me thinking how helpless it must feel not to be able to communicate what he wants in a situation like that. At home with the family, we understand him pretty well, and if we don’t understand him right away, he knows where everything is and can walk over and show us what he wants by pointing or gesturing. At school, I think pretty much the same is true. They’ve had time to learn his adapted sign language, and he knows the layout and routine. But beyond a handful of people at school and home who know his signs and have learned to understand his disjointed bits of speech, Linc seems profoundly cut off from the world. A small incident like that one reminded me anew that, as expressive as he is, he can't do something as simple as ask for a drink of water without one of his translators around.
And the thing is, his speech really is coming along slowly but surely. It’s just the way it’s coming along feels like a guessing game most days. See, he is constantly babbling. He talks and makes noise all day long. Sometimes, in that stream of never ending sound, we are pretty sure we hear words (often phrases even) that match up to what he’s doing or wanting at the moment. But, just as often, the stream of sounds is just a nonsensical chain of syllables that sounds more like Chinese than English. Occasionally, it even has a bit of a Yiddish slant. (He's very exotic, that kid.)
Because of that, it can be so easy to be convinced one minute that he is speaking in sentences and become equally convinced two hours later that you were making it all up and he isn’t really speaking at all. It’s kind of like panning for gold. There’s so much there, but you have to keep sifting the mud away to see if what you’ve got is the real thing or just more debris. Was that a real word or just a random vowel/consonant pairing that sounded like gold to us desperate prospectors?
For some reason, the excess chatter makes us question the real words. Perhaps it shouldn’t, but it seems odd that he would so often combine nonsense sounds and real language. It’s almost like he doesn’t know he’s speaking correctly when he gets it right or (what I suspect) that he doesn’t know he’s not saying anything identifiable with all the rest of the babbling. And we have no clue how to teach him to cut away the excess and keep the real language.
Tuesday night, as we drove home, Linc was unusually quiet. I almost forgot he was back there until I heard him giggle at something, though I never figured out what it was that tickled him sitting alone in the dark, empty back seat. When we got home, though, he burst in on Nico and his daddy with a grin, saying “hi” and running in for his welcome home hugs. We settled in for our nightly ritual: a snack on the couch before bed. Linc finished his cookie and slid off the ottoman, where he likes to sit and watch TV. He padded into the kitchen, and we could hear him open the pantry door. I yelled at him from my seat on the couch, “Linc, what are you doing?”
And from the kitchen he said, clear as day, “Not done. More.” Sam and I looked at each other.
“Did you hear what he said?” I asked, wondering if I was making this up.
Sam answered, “Oh yeah, he said not done, more.”
Sam found him pointing at a jar of candy in the pantry, repeating. “More.” And you can bet he got a handful of candy corn for his trouble. He came back and took his seat on the ottoman, grinning and clutching his prize for dear life. He smiled at me and showed me his candy corn and announced, “Baga ba dit. Baga ba dit chaim.”
“Bagabadit chaim, “ I agreed. Because really, I understood. It was a victory cry. Mission accomplished, treat in hand, sugar high imminent. Look what I got, mom. I didn’t have to do any sifting to find the message there, gold or no.
What I'm learning in moments like this is that when I start to panic, it's a clear sign I'm asking the wrong questions. In those moments, I'm focusing on the what if's and looking ten steps down the road and around the corner instead of focusing on the scenery of where we are now, today. The question isn't when is he going to speak already but when am I going to start listening to what he is already saying. The roar of what he's not saying shouldn't be allowed to drown out what he is already saying. We don't have to be in the business of sorting the wheat from the chaff because, mumble or monologue, it's all speech, it's all progress, and the babble doesn't cancel out the real deal.
We're not cutting away the chaff from the substance of Linc’s speech; we're watching the chaff become wheat, too, as his sounds grow into words. I don’t think he’ll stop babbling, just that one day we’ll realize the babbling is becoming more and more coherent, the vowel/consonant pairings becoming less and less accidental. And one day, before we know it, we'll wake up and realize hey, this is all wheat.
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