So I tend to blather sort of a lot about language use in fiction. (I was going to link my Apex blogpost, "Your Voice Is Not Your Enemy," but the page seems to have disappeared off of the site. Curses!) Language use for me is one of the most fun and satisfying parts of writing and reading and I could blather about it even more with very little provocation.

This post is not about that.

Before my now-preschooler Julian was a week old, before he was really giving me any reason to, I was already calling him the Changeling. I'm not even sure why. It was just a nickname that stuck. He always seemed (and still does) different somehow from his peers. When I'd go out with him I'd get accosted by women who would stare into his eyes and tell me what an old soul he was, or how he was the most alert baby they'd ever seen. But he never talked.

See, as a baby I was a talker. I'm told I spoke in complete sentences by age 1 and was reading -- really reading, not memorizing words by sight -- and making up (nonsensical) rhyming couplets by 2. It was only within the past several years that I realized this was sort of unusual, and maybe I did Julian a disservice by assuming the same would apply to him. I have videos of him at 14-16 months or so, babbling into the camera, me filming for no other reason than he was babbling, doing what other babies do from a few months of age onward. I have a memory from when he was maybe 24 months or so, when he'd made my day by attempting to say the word "duck," and I then heard that a friend of mine's same-aged toddler had begun to correctly conjugate verb tenses. That might have been when I realized he probably wasn't going to just catch up on his own. He was already in Early Intervention for speech but EI, while very probably useful for many many problems, was crap for him. I'd correctly diagnosed his issue ages ago, but EI specifically says they don't do targeted therapy for it. Kids have to wait until they're 3 and go on to the district-supervised therapies to get that help.

Turns out he has pretty severe oral/verbal apraxia. What this means in his case is that while he's cognitively normal and seems also to be very bright in some areas (receptive speech included -- he builds vocabulary like a machine), his brain and the muscles of his mouth don't communicate that well. He couldn't purse his lips (to drink through a straw, kiss, or blow air out of his mouth) until he was two, and then only after I spent hours with him blowing cotton balls across a tabletop at each other with straws. He couldn't stick out his tongue and wiggle it until he was almost 3, and that not until his (utterly fantastic) speech therapist and I had to manually input the muscle memory by moving his tongue around with a popsicle stick, every day, several times a day, for days on end. He had no gag reflex as a baby/toddler, which led to many, many horrible choking episodes in which he very nearly died. Even now at nearly 4 he has a hard time touching the tip of his tongue to the roof of his mouth on command, as you do to vocalize the L sound.

How do you correct apraxia? Practice. Lots and lots of practice. When I said we had to manually input his muscle memory, that was no lie and no exaggeration. It's what you have to do. Over and over. For each letter. For each letter sound in isolation. For each letter blend in conjunction. For every single little thing you take for granted in a neurotypical child's speech. Dozens and dozens and probably hundreds of times. He'd go for weeks with no progress and then wake up one morning making one new letter sound, or trying to approximate one new word, and that was a Good Day. With apraxia you fight for every inch of ground you gain, and then you fight to hold it, because without exercising that newly-input muscle memory, it disappears.

Combined with the fact that he's a bit self-conscious and a bit of a perfectionist, leading him to refuse to practice things he couldn't already do perfectly, there was little-to-no progress made on all of these fronts for a long, long time. Only within the past few months have I realized I no longer have to translate everything he says, even to my parents and other adults who see him often. But he still has an odd staccato quality of speech, though the gaps between syllables are shortening and he can make and blend most sounds in isolation and combination without over- or under-emphasizing. He went through the longest phase of overemphasizing end-sounds, so for, say, "dump truck" he'd say "dum-(pause)-PUH tru-(pause)CK." Besides that he couldn't make r blends so "truck" sounded bizarre anyway. And that he'd default to indicating words by making their initial sound and nothing else, so every word that began with B he would say as "buh," no matter how many syllables it had after that initial B sound. Same with D and P, which were the other two consonant sounds he could make cleanly. He used to love the Curious George books, but he couldn't say either of those words, or make a soft g sound for that matter, so he'd shorten "Curious George" to a sound sort of like "guh." And this was endemic to his speech. For years he was virtually unintelligible. Everything hinged on context. If I couldn't see what he was pointing at I could barely understand him. Talking to him on the phone was out of the question. Holding a conversation with him, forget it. I was away for a couple of days last November and called him every morning and I couldn't understand 95% of what he was saying. He was 2 years, 23 months old at the time.

I think what I'm getting at is the irony of it, if irony is actually what it is. Language is one of my major passions, and I went through every day of his infancy not being able to wait until he could communicate with me -- only to find that I would have to fight tooth and nail for each spoken word he added to his vocabulary. It was the hardest fucking thing I've ever done in my life, but also one of the most satisfying. He still has habitual speech issues like the staccato sound -- oh yeah, another setback is that he imprints on bad speech habits and they are hell to unlearn! and he gets self-conscious and quiet when he's working with his speech therapist so I'm not altogether sure she believes me when I list for her the improvements he's made recently, and just how immense they are. Right now we're working on those little words like a, the, to. But he's speaking in 10-word+ sentences regularly and damn near all of his sounds and sound blends come out clean.

Plus he's a coy little thing. He keeps coming out with words or ideas I didn't know he had in there, but when I ask him to repeat them he goes all shy and "I don't know." and that's the end of that until I can trick it out of him later. This is the same child who had me convinced for over a year that he didn't know his colors and I wasn't sure he did until I tricked that out of him too. Same with shapes and letters and all those things they use to quantify children's intelligence which he doesn't give a shit about and never has.

I'm not sure where I was going with this, apart from to vaguely reflect on being a very language-oriented person and having a child who can't be, or at least not yet, and how very strange that feels. It's still a fight to get him caught up, and he's still not confident enough to really try to engage the kids at preschool, but he'll get there. He's still gaining ground, slowly but surely. Today I noticed he's finally putting his final S sounds on possessives, and his beginning S sounds on words that begin with it. (For whatever reason middle S blends he was ok with but beginnings and ends were weird. He'd leave the ends off but nasalize the beginnings, so for "snow" he'd sort of blow air through his nose and then vocalize the "now" part so it would come out sounding sort of like "fhnow." Hard as hell for people-not-his-parents to understand.) A couple of weeks ago he mastered Z and V blends. It's little steps like these that add up to fluency. A lot of his issue now is habit -- if he breaks up a word into staccato sections, you tell him to "put it together" and he'll repeat it a bit smoother. If he habitually shortens a sentence, say, "No brush teeth!" and you say "I don't know what that means!" he'll self-correct to a complete and grammatically correct sentence. It's tedious as hell but it works, and I'm convinced there's still so much in there in his head that he doesn't feel confident enough to try to share. My goal is for him to have caught up by kindergarten. Luckily his birthday is two days from the state boundary line so he won't start until he's nearly 6. I'm pretty confident he'll get there. He's smart and he's reached a point where he's willing to work for this, and we'll get him there, one little step at a time.

Meantime, the cute!