In the boxes of treasure from my parents' basement I found two cassette tapes I thought we had lost forever. Both are tapes of my brother and me singing, talking, telling stories, and basically being silly. In the first of the tapes, I was two or three years old, and my brother was four or five. Tonight I forced my husband to listen with me to parts of those tapes. I had two basic reactions:
1) My brother's made-up stories and songs were always so much more entertaining than mine. Take, for example, my brother's classic song "God and Santa Claus Want You to Share Toys," and my pathetic follow-up about a mud puddle named Muddy Mud-Mud.
2) Boy, did we stutter. Both of us. My brother outgrew his stutter by second grade . . . which surprises me when I hear the severity of it on those tapes. Funny, I listened to those tapes when I was a kid and never noticed it. Wow, how did I miss it? We didn't really repeat many sounds, but the stuttering was right there under the surface. I could feel it even before it showed itself in a disfluency of some sort. It took me a few minutes to figure out what it was I was hearing, but finally I realized I was hearing the Valsalva maneuver. It was all over the place in our speech, even in the middle of otherwise perfectly fluent sentences. Our little throats closed all the time when we spoke. Weird.
I am so glad I found the tapes. Just yesterday I worried about my son's speech during a long, pause-laden story of his that seemed to take much more effort than it should have. I kept wondering, "Just how much disfluency is allowed in normal disfluency?" Now, however, I am encouraged. Yeah, sure, it took my son a while, and he threw in an uh and an um, but I didn't notice that sticky Valsalva quality in his throat. Maybe the kid will escape it yet.
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