This One's Going Right Back to the Library

Last night my husband and I watched one of the items I got from the drive-through library. It was this video about children who stutter. Aside from the strange choice of camera shots and the uber eighties glasses the narrator was wearing, the video was just so-so. It was supposed to contain clips of children stuttering. Real kids doing real stuttering.

But we were left with the feeling that they picked four kids who were borderline cases at best to make the techniques they were suggesting look good. Either that, or L. is the only kid in the world who stutters so severely. Which is our fear. There's not much written or videotaped about kids with stutters like hers.

Okay, so there was one cute little blond boy who was shown briefly -- demonstrating both the prolongation and the block, of course, since the other children seemed to have never experienced either -- doing some hard core stuttering. But they didn't show him again in the section where the parents were using the suggested techniques with their kids. All the kids in that section were almost completely fluent. And little Mr. Blond Boy was the only child who didn't make it onto the cover of the video, too. What the hell? It's a stuttering video! Let the kid with the biggest stutter win for a change! Naturally, I considered the possibility that the parenting techniques had no effect on a more severe stutter and that any footage of the blond kid was destroyed. Or maybe they were afraid showing a severe stutter would scare parents? Or . . . or . . . what?

As a parent of a kid with a stutter worse than little Mr. Blond Boy's, I was a bit offended. And alarmed, really. I mean, I've said before to my husband that my daughter stutters like an adult, that I've never (in my admittedly limited experience) seen a child stutter that way. Last night's video viewing reinforced that idea. It left my husband feeling down about L.'s prognosis, too.

Not that we think less of her if she stutters. Not that the stuttering itself bothers us. It's the thought that she will have to struggle, that she might feel the need to hide parts of herself, that people might not always recognize her immediately as the bright and charming person she is.

I said the other day that she was demonstrating two of the eight warning signs associated with increased risk for stuttering into adulthood. She has already added a third: she has "expressed concern" about her speech (when she asked me to help her . . . which, by the way, she has done twice now).

She also substitutes words. She had conned me into reading one of those insipid, plotless Dora the Explorer books yet again and, pointing to a picture of Dora, said, "I-i-i-i-i-iiis D-d-d-d-d-----d-d-d---- (pause) She w-w-wear sssswimsuit?" She gave up on saying Dora and substituted with she. That is such an adult way to stutter. Crap, part of me is proud of her ingenuity. She's not even two, for crying out loud.

I can remember being totally fluent when I was a young child. Or, at least, I can remember not knowing anything about stuttering, at least not being aware of it, not ever feeling tension when I spoke. I can remember a time when I said what I wanted to whomever I wanted, a time when I didn't have to weigh my words or judge the receptiveness of listeners. I remember a time when I didn't know speaking fear. And later I always saw myself that way, as just normal, but with this thing that happened to me and kept people from seeing the real me when I spoke.

What if L. retains none of those fluent memories? What if she remembers only fear and tension and being different?