Speech – III/Tools - II

In “Laugh Like a…” and “Gortles vs. Vocal Fry” I began to write about the Full Spectrum of speech expressed by my children and our family approaches to some of our challenges in that realm. These include, on the one hand, exceptional sassiness or dorkiness of oral interaction styles and, on the other, widely disparate levels of verbal agility.

Here are two more topics to consider: repetition and volume.

G and Z loooove to repeat. Single words, questions, quotations, astute observations, not-so-astute observations, random sounds…all are fodder for extensive repetition. This shared habit is rooted in two very different sources: G’s mind seems to get drawn into a pattern - he’ll blurt out a word or phrase from time to time, sometimes for days, as the neural impulse strikes; Z likes uninterrupted attention, which speech can bring, but she also self-soothes – and learns --with patter.

We use the same tool inclusive of these two distinct contexts. Since it works well in our household, it just might work in a wide range of families. I therefore offer:

A Good Rule for Parents and People:

1.     The One Time Rule

Things may only be said ONE TIME.  If something is repeated, Mama – often in cahoots with the currently non-repeating child – may utter the powerful phrase, “One Time Rule”…as many times as is necessary.

a.     The Awesome [or insert your dreadful trending word here] Rule

Each child may utter the word “awesome” ONE TIME per diem.

For some reason, this has worked. Good thing, because we have yet to work out the Consequences.

Partly because of low tone, G also has issues with volume modulation. More specifically, he speaks very, very loudly, especially when excited (and he’s an enthusiastic guy). His speech volume is probably the single biggest obstacle to other kids’ acceptance and comfort in his presence.

When we are together as a family, I might say, “Stop shouting in my ear,” “Turn it Down, please,” or “I am RIGHT HERE.” I don’t want to humiliate him in public, though, so we have devised a sort of turning-down-a-radio-dial type motion that is meant to indicate to him that he needs to try to modulate his voice to a quieter level.

Alas, unless he is looking right at my finger, he doesn’t notice this signal! My gesture, then, gets bigger and bigger, progressing initially to something resembling the “cuckoo” finger swirl and then evolving, as it widens, into a one-handed version of Jazz Hands.

In contrast, and no, I am not making this up just to, as it were, fill my proverbial Spectrum, Z has issues with speaking at LOW volume. Specifically, she prefers to speak At All Times, and so, if she has been asked to be quiet, she simply speaks much, much more quietly, typically in a very special language of her very own. This brings us to:

2.  The No Poltergeist Voices Rule

If your attachment disordered, or otherwise anxiously garrulous, or perhaps even happily loquacious child has not stopped speaking in approximately seven hours (years) and if he or she insists upon whispering “ZI-guh-sa-ba ZI-guh-sa-ba” over and over near your ear while you are on the phone for Three Minutes after Paying Attention to her or him the Entire Day (or some similar situation), simply invoke the No Poltergeist Voices Rule.

This might work.

Jazz Hands!

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama

Vocal Fry vs. Gortles

Z was waiting for me at pickup the other day with a big, saucy grin on her face. She held up the latest Scholastic book order and announced: “Justin Beaver is in here?…He’s HOT!”

In a sudden transformation as surprising to myself as to Z, Full Spectrum Mama turned into a fascist, super-conservative, sexist anachronism. I heard the following phrase burst from my formerly liberal lips: “You are! Five! Years! Old! Okay, Six! You will NEVER say that word again!”

My rule of fear and oppression complete, Z felt able to respond: “Um, okay Mom.” Eye roll.

Then, resisting the urge to prove that ***I*** am the one who knows not only how to Read but to correctly pronounce Justin Bieber’s name as well, I took a step back to dispassionately analyze my reaction.

The first language Z heard was the local dialect in Fuzhou (a.k.a. Linchuan), in Jiangxi province in China. I am sure she also heard some Mandarin (which I have continued to integrate into her life, though not as much as I’d like). Until she was almost ten months old, she’d never heard a word of English. Nonetheless, Z has been speaking it in complete sentences with perfect diction since she was 18-months old.

What is truly remarkable about her speech to me, though, is the apparent savviness of her tone. She comes across as authoritative yet casually chatty -- much like a clever, popular, connected teen. Perhaps the most obvious element of this mature tone is how she uses the ultimate tool of with it girls everywhere: vocal fry (http://gawker.com/5867222/vocal-fry-is-the-hot-new-linguistic-fad-among-women), see also (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html). Vocal fry sounds rather like a crumpling up of the inquisitive at the ends of her sentences. It’s a mini-hipster-rumble that signifies at once being totally in-the-know and a lack of caring too much.

G rumbles when he talks, too. Because he has some low muscle tone, phlegm often catches in his throat when he speaks and he makes a slight gurgling sound behind his words. I call this “gortles,” as in, “Honey, clear your throat – ya got gortles.”

Low muscle tone also results in lax enunciation of many sounds. This, coupled with his unique cadence -- Pardner often notes how G “sounds like John Wayne” – makes G sometimes hard to understand, particularly for other children.

G has been receiving speech therapy through his school since he his IEP (Individualized Education Program) was initiated years ago. His speech therapist initially maintained that G would “never” make much progress in his speech. I have been able, however, using a rewards system that actually matters to him (pokemon cards), to ease him into the habit of pronouncing many sounds correctly and he has become much easier to understand.

Recently, our dear friends Shu Shu Chuck and Fern Ayi (Auntie [in Mandarin] Fern) came to visit us. They brought lovely educational gifts for the kids and spent lots of doting time with them. Fern Ayi, was even kind enough to get up before dawn with them (“Would it be okay with your mom if you got up?” “Yes!!!” [“No.”]) and feed them bottomless bowls of cereal.

At brunch on Sunday, Chuck noted that same John Wayne cadence to G’s speech. I immediately began to explain that we are working on his speech, that he has help at school and so on.

Chuck looked a little sad. “Why?” he asked. “Why try to change what is unique about him?” He said he thinks G is a “wonderful” kid just as he is and decried our culture’s tendency to try to make everyone the same, and to treat difference as if it is a sickness.

I agreed with him wholeheartedly. Without really considering my audience, I had been making my standard excuses, not really lies per se, but statements intended to placate others who may be critical -- when in fact I think G is PERFECT EXACTLY AS HE IS.

Now to give some legitimacy to Chuck’s words: he is none other than Chuck Hoberman (http://www.hoberman.com/home.html), an amazing inventor and brilliant thinker. Among other things, Chuck designs marvelous toys for curious people of all ages. I think his life and oeuvre give great weight to his contention that we should NOT necessarily try to “normalize” our children’s every atypical quality.

Speaking of normalization, if truth be told, I’d like to ease Z’s speech away from the conformi-cool area of the speech spectrum:

The other night, we went to the local café for pizza night with another family. The sweet, smart mother of Z’s good friend brought her two girls - Z’s good friend and friend’s little sister. I brought along G’s best friend too, to be fair. (The injustice of unequal playdates is one felt and expressed powerfully across the FSM household spectrum.) The boys had their own table and the five of us girls sat at another.

I am always a tiny bit wary of consorting with intact (i.e. not gobsmacked by divorce) families who seem like “normal” people with seemingly neurotypical, psychotypical kids. I am well aware that “seem” may well be the operative word in most cases; also, the above describes most of my friends…I am just setting this story up here. Our family is blended in several more ways than average and I hope I may be forgiven a smidge of healthy, wholesome paranoia.

At the boys’ table, G was talking about one of his favorite subjects, marine biology. He kept referring to “aminals” and his friend would get frustrated and correct him. After resisting the urge for some time I finally butted in, letting G’s friend know that I thought saying “aminal” was “pretty darn cute.” He remained unconvinced. “I think it’s annoying,” he informed us. G’s face fell.

Over at the girls’ table, Z was holding up her knife and fork and looking through them to frame my face. Then, still looking at me, she began to move them around in a kind of criss-cross pattern. In her perfect, angelic, singsong voice, she began to sing a perfectly enunciated little tune: “Cut, cut, cut…Cut my mommy’s face.”

The mother, who was seated next to me, leaned in and asked, very quietly, “Does she have violent tendencies?”

At that moment, I wished for Z to be much, much less comprehensible.

Not for the first time, I found myself simultaneously
1. wishing two opposite things for my two dissimilar children: that G’s speech would be more clear and compelling, and that Z’s speech would be less clear and less compelling; and
2. wishing that in each case I wasn’t wishing what I was wishing.

Despite knowing it was a kind of funny situation, and even with all those nice people around me I felt very lonely just then.

Love,
Full Spectrum Mama

"Laugh Like a..."

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Interrupting Cow.”

“Interrupting Cow—“

“--Moo!”

If you don’t think this joke is funny, or if you think it should be told Only Once, you are probably on a different part of the humor spectrum than we are. Lucky you. We are a very corny, silly family with penchants for repetition and nonsense. Z’s sense of humor tends toward the witty, G’s toward the baffling and awkward; both love a good potty joke. As for me, sometimes I feel as a Full Spectrum Mama that if I am not laughing I might well be crying…So when my head is clear enough to make that choice (which is not a given), I choose the giggle. That shared sense of humor may well be our saving grace.

This happened when Z was four years old. In order for the story to make sense, a few preliminary details are necessary. First, we do not have any broadcast television and live in a pretty idyllic and sheltered rural area. Second, we do not cuss in our home. I believe I may have said the “S” word once or twice, but that’s it. I manage to eff up on a daily basis in plenty of other ways, but non-cussin’ is one area of success. It is possible that Z and G have heard profanities at their father’s house, but always as exclamations, never as vernacular. Finally, at the time this incident occurred, my now-husband (henceforth referred to as “Pardner”) and I were dating, and the kids called him “Shushu” (uncle in Mandarin).

We are at a cute little restaurant in trendy, charming New Hope, PA enjoying some adequate Mexican food on our way home from visiting with family. Again, Z is four, a sassy, going-on-25-going-on-75-four, but nonetheless she is barely as tall as the table at which we are sitting. Our little family – Pardner, G, Z and me – is enjoying some jovial repartee and eating tacos and sides. Z likes her food spicy and G likes his bland, so I have apportioned the food accordingly.

In my memory, I am looking at my yellow rice and lumpy brown pile of beans when Z turns to me and says, “Mama, Susu Pardner makes you laugh like a bitc#!”

I turn to Pardner, sotto voce, “Did she just say laughlikeabitc#?” I feel, simultaneously, a very wide range of emotions. The dominant feeling is: I am about to crack up laughing worse than ever before in my life in a way that will be highly inappropriate on many levels. Also, I will not be able to stop laughing, either, should I start.

I lurch into autopilot-damage-control: “Snitch,” I say, “Where did you learn that funny, funny word?”

“I said Bitc#.”

“Oh, hahahahaha, ditch, yes, that IS funny. Hahaha.”

“Bitc#.”

Has it ever hit you full on that your child, your tiny little child, is already much cooler than you ever have been or could hope to be? The best part was how she said it, all feisty and ghetto, and like she knew what she meant. Head bobbing a little from side to side and the pointed finger going. For real.

Let’s face it, hearing babies and little kids swear is funny. It just is. Cute, too. Yet of course Full Spectrum Mama has to protect her daughter from her own precociousness and from apparent insidious influences. As much as Z has seemed all her life to need nobody, nohow, she’s still a child and she needs guidance.

Somehow I kept a straight face. I used the famous parental move “ignore and move on,” (a.k.a. “Cuban Missile Crisis”). Afterward, I did do my best to figure out where she got the idea to say “laugh like a bitc#,” although I never did find out. I believe she has forgotten this particular phrase, though she still can be plenty fresh. I remind myself on the daily that Z may seem like a cooler, more socially-adept peer, even, ahem, someone who might’ve been mean to me in high school but – she isn’t. She is my little girl. So I need to be the grown-up.


I thought about “laugh like a bitc#” the other day when we were walking home from school. There is a beautiful forested area right next door to our house and I sometimes allow G to walk through it en route. That day he asked, “Mama, may I venture into the woods?” “Why, yes, my son, go in peace,” I replied.

Wonder where he gets his quirky turn of phrase?

G, a major bookworm from birth, has always talked as if he lives in medieval times, or is in a Poke´mon program (he sees them chez the ex). Back in preschool, he would literally ask the other kids questions like, “Would you care to engage in a playful interaction with me?” (Sample, highly effective Z preschool utterance: “Gimme that if you wanna play with me…whatever.”)

How did it evolve that my two children – who have the same parents* -- express such a Full Spectrum of speech patterns? Ways of speaking -- how we tap into the vernacular (or not), how we draw from our reading and other parts of the world around us…how we hit the coolness nail on the head or NOT -- can be seen as more Full and rich Spectrums.

(*Oops, I totally forgot that Z was adopted for a moment there – but let’s agree that certainly she has had the same parental environment as G since she was 9 months old…)

Z remains the sharp-witted queen of kindergarten, whilst G’s courtly language flies about as well in fourth grade as it did back then. Oh, someday he will find his tribe. But…Goddess? PLEASE get him through middle school with his sweet soul intact. And please, please -- I know it is not my girlbaby’s job, but she can handle it -- make Z protect him once they are in high school together.

I will do anything!!!

Laughing like a bitc#,
Love,
Full Spectrum Mama