5 hours ago
17
I still can’t pinpoint when it happened, but it felt as though my child lost the ability to communicate overnight.
Of course, that is not what happened, and he never lost the ability to communicate. But it felt as though he did at the time. And even with the benefit of hindsight, it felt like he went from a chatty three-year-old to being unable to get a sentence out. “W-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-what c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c-can I-I-I-I-I-I-I” and then silence as he gave up trying and just looked up at me.
I often joke my parenting approach is one of benign neglect, and that I lack any instinct at all. I still do lean into that caricature at times (“I will have to do a few minutes of parenting this weekend,” I recently texted the family group chat in mock horror). This joke originated when I first became a mother more than eight years ago. I perpetuated this idea that my children were not the centre of my world and therefore I was somehow different from other mothers.
Privately I thought I was more ambivalent about motherhood than I anticipated. It turns out I had mistaken what maternal ambivalence was.
I thought it meant you could grow bored with your children, that at times you would rather be somewhere else than at home watching them refuse to eat dinner. Again. I thought it meant you grew frustrated with them, did not always enjoy them. But that is not maternal ambivalence and I am not ambivalent.
I slowly realised how wrong I was over the course of my son’s stutter.
I first noticed something could be wrong around six months before Cormac “lost the ability to communicate overnight”.
Sometimes at night, he would struggle with the beginning of a sentence. “I-I-I-I-I-I-I want a story now,” he would say. Or “G-g-g-g-g-goodnight.” It was not every night and it might have only been one sentence in the entire night.
But it bothered me enough to inquire through NSW Health, the public health system, about how and if I should get him assessed. The wait list was about six months long. I figured the worst outcome of putting his name down was that the date would roll around and it would turn out to be overzealous worrying on my part. Which would be terrible for my self-image as a “cool and chill mum” but that was the only bad outcome.
Until five-and-a-half months later when, in the space of a week, Cormac went from almost zero stuttering to stuttering in every single sentence. This time, we all noticed. The childcare educators pulled me aside to tell me, my mother became concerned, and my husband and I looked across at each other in shock as Cormac struggled to get even one word out.
I panicked.
After I was done panicking (I allotted myself 90 minutes) I rang NSW Health and told them how much the situation had deteriorated. He had an appointment within a week. He was classified as having a “severe” stutter by a speech pathologist and I was introduced to the Lidcombe Program, an evidence-based treatment for a stutter built on daily therapy … done by a parent. And it could only be done by one parent, because the parent did so under the training and supervision of a speech pathologist and the feedback the child received needed to be consistent.
Basically if my husband and I noticed different things and gave feedback on different things, that could be confusing and detrimental for the child. At the time my husband had started a new job and I had more flexibility for weekly in-person appointments so we decided I would be the parent.
It was going to be so annoying, but loving someone is annoying. Parenting is annoying! The daily experience is one of duty, obligation, joy, drudgery, but threaded through that is fierce love.
I set out on this daily course of therapy which, like childbirth and moving to the other side of the world, I knew would have its challenges but could not possibly have understood how hard it was until I was in the middle of it.
Doing daily therapy with a child is hard. Turning up every single day. Not dropping a day or two, or two in a row here and there, is hard. When I did drop a few days in a row the regression was so profound I still feel guilty. No matter how tired and cranky he was, no matter how tired and cranky I was, no matter anything, we had to do it. And we did. I did.
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After he had been in treatment for his stutter for 18 months, the daily exercises had wound down but there was still a sprinkling of speech therapy. And in what felt like a miracle – but was the product of perseverance, hard work, evidence-backed methods – he did not stutter any more. He speaks fluently, to use the language of speech therapists.
At the time, during the course of an interview, a professor casually identified me as an “educated, anxious mother”. It was so far from my self-perception that I was initially very defensive. Although thankfully only privately.
I am not an anxious mother, I thought. If anything I was an ambivalent mother! But had I not carefully watched my child as he grew? Had I not felt physical pain in my chest when he struggled to communicate? Had I not done something about it? An extremely time-consuming and emotionally draining something?
But I was also someone who snapped at my children. Hated taking them to swimming lessons. Resented daily pickup. And did not enjoy going out for meals with them AT ALL. I also really, really, really looked forward to the nights I spent away from them. And was often more interested in doing literally anything that wasn’t playing with them.
But so what? Over that 18 months my secret self-perception – that I perhaps did not care as much as other mothers – collapsed. I was there when he needed me. I was overbearing when he needed me to be. I had mistaken entirely common and dare I say ordinary feelings about motherhood for ambivalence. At the same time I was writing a novel that was centred on what it would be like to grow up with an ambivalent mother. (I must stress I do not have personal experience of this. In fact, the opposite. She is TOO interested in me sometimes!)
It opened up an entirely new seam in my writing. If a mother can be wrong about herself, what else could we be wrong about? What started out as a straightforward story about “good” mothers and “toxic” mothers became more complicated. The ambivalent mother in my book became more than a mum, she became an actual human being.
It sounds like, and perhaps reads like, a way to shoehorn my novel (out now) into a standard personal essay. But it’s all true. During one of the most transformative and difficult times of my life I was writing the entire time. While my son was learning to speak fluently I was fundamentally learning something I had paid lip service to for years: we do not need to be perfect to be good.
