Beyond the speech, He is HAPPY
More than two years ago now, I had a client come to me who was 3 years old. My husband met his mom waiting in an OT office for my daughter Ashlynn, and over the course of a few months he saw that this child wasn’t making any progress with words. He struck up a conversation with the mom and asked her if she had ever heard of apraxia. She said she had heard of it, but didn’t know what it was. My husband told her he didn’t profess to be an expert, but it seemed like that is what her child had. He recommended she call me, his wife. haha
Well, she did. I saw him and he could only say “O” and he had the most elaborate and refined gesturing and pantomiming system I had ever seen. It was absolutely incredible. We got to work right away and he very slowly began to make progress.
I was new to my office building at the time, and the custodian began his shift each night around 6:00 PM, the time that Alex would come to my office. An innocent bystander, he would let them in since the doors closed around 6:00 and he saw that quiet Alex who couldn’t even tell him “hi.” As the months progressed and then turned into years, Alex has found his voice and instead of hiding behind his mom in shame, he now seeks Eddie out and enthusiastically and says ‘HI EDDIE” in his loudest and proudest voice possible.
One day Eddie came in to empty the trash as I was writing notes. He asked about Alex as he always did. He seemed to have taken a liking to him and wanted to be updated on his progress. As I was telling him how much he had improved in speech, he expressed to me the most profound observation I had never stopped to consider. He told me,
“When I met Alex, he was sad. He never smiled. He cowered behind his mom. What I see the most, beyond the speech, is that Alex is….HAPPY.”
Happy. Of course he’s happy. He has always been a happy boy, even in his pantomiming stages; however if I think back to the boy he was outside my office, no one would have used that description. He was shy. He did hide. He hid away, and once he found his voice he came out of the shadows and not only said but yelled Eddie’s name with a big smile. How had I missed that?
It made me think back to one of my first students with apraxia who I met in Kindergarten. He had no words when I met him, but through the course of the semester gained a small but functional list of words. I had this system where if they earned so many stickers they could invite a friend to play with them over lunch. I remember the day vividly. His friend came and they played a video game on my iPad and as I sat and watched them huddled together with their backs turned to me I couldn’t stop smiling because in that moment, Bryan was just like any other boy playing with his friend. He used the words he knew and could say, and he shouted them, and laughed and smiled and was just a regular old kid.
Eddie’s words of objective observation have been in my head now ever since we had that conversation, and recently I was in therapy with a 7 year old who came to me last year still nonverbal. Her emotional health was far from well and it took months for me to build a rapport and just have her shed her negative feelings around speech and begin to trust me and practice again. It’s been a loooongggg road. We’ve had forward motion and then setbacks that would devastate her parents, and now that I think of it, I’m sure they devastated her too. Heck they devastated me!! We have had to work through a lot of avoidance and shut down behaviors through encouragement and growth mindset techniques. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t pray I could help her. There were times I wasn’t sure.
Yesterday the most amazing thing happened. I dropped a game (which I’m sure my clumsiness is kinda funny) and she laughed. I was struck by it, not because it was weird, or inappropriate or out of the ordinary. I was struck by it because I realized after 9 months of knowing her I had never once heard her laugh out loud. I looked up at her smiling face and I laughed with her and we laughed together. We tried to stop but we couldn’t so we kept on laughing and to see her genuinely happy made me gleeful and made me laugh harder and made her laugh harder and so we laughed some more.
I thought back to Eddie’s non-speech observation with Alex and I looked at her and realized she can finally laugh because the cloud has finally lifted and she sees the light! I thought back to what happened that session and couldn’t believe what I had missed just trying to focus on the next speech goal. I was so grateful to get the time to reflect because I realized that before I started the session she walked in and said “hi” without any cueing, and once I started the session I asked her who brought her and she replied, “my mom” and then when I asked her who was watching her little brother she replied, “my dad” and when I asked her yes/no q’s she responded by saying “yeah” and “no” and if I clarified something she responded with “k” and I was so wrapped up in her new goals, I didn’t realize she had NEVER been able to have this back and forth with me before. This was a HUGE milestone.
She realized it though. She went onto laugh more in the session and I laughed with her because I realized in that one session we had accomplished and seen the fruition of literally 7 months worth of goals. Usually shy to talk outside the speech room, she confidently entered the waiting room and looked back to a family of 6 waiting for their child’s turn and waved her hand and told them all
“Bye!” with this big and glorious smile plastered all over her face.
I might have cried.