I considered what I wanted to ask the farmer. It wasn’t a difficult question, just, “Where are you guys from?”
I got this, I thought.
But, when I started the sentence, the first two words combined into one impossible utterance in my head.
My jaw, mouth, and all the other mechanisms that make sound clenched up, refusing to participate.
I sputtered out a quick “you guys from” and then stopped, waiting to see if he would say “what,” forcing me to repeat myself.
“Williamstown,” he said. “And this morning was especially hairy, a lot of sleet and ice on the road.”
I nodded, caring less about what he had said and more about the fact that I was off the hook.
I quickly moved on and walked to the next booth at the winter’s farmers market in the gymnasium of a vocational school near our home in western Massachusetts.
I’d remain silent, not asking any more questions. Sometimes, speaking isn’t worth the trouble.
I have lived with a stutter for most of my life.
Once a week in elementary school, I was removed from class to work with a speech therapist, which I loved (every kid wants to get out of school), but it didn’t have any long-term effect.
Then, in my early teens, my father’s co-worker — a fellow cop involved in the 1980s self-empowerment craze (think walking barefoot on hot coals and listening to Tony Robbins)— hypnotized me in the musty basement of our Long Island home.
My mom, dad, and three sisters waited excitedly upstairs as he promised if I surrendered to the hypnosis, I could beat my stutter, wiping it away completely — and it worked!
At least for a few days.
(He also said if I put my mind to it, I could stop a grown man from pushing down my outspread arms, which sounded extremely cool to a 14-year-old, but that didn’t work either.)
Eventually, the stutter returned.
Since then, I’ve read some books on stuttering, not finishing most, and spent many years in psychotherapy, not for stuttering, but where I learned techniques like mindfulness and deep breathing that weakened but did not conquer my stutter.
I’m 48 and it still sneaks up on me when I meet someone new or feel intimidated or when someone asks me to repeat myself. (I now know that, at least in part, my stutter was caused by untreated trauma I experienced as a child.)
Until recently, speaking in checkout lines could be downright painful. As I wait, I rehearse, repeating in my head something as simple as “coffee, no milk,” imagining facial contortions as I slam into that hard “C”.
Once, while standing in line at a cafe, I repeated in my head the sentence, “I would like a green tea. Thank you,” as the line of people shrunk and it was just me and the woman behind the counter.
She stared at me as I froze.
The words — green tea — wouldn’t come.
They were buried under hard gravel somewhere deep inside of me and I couldn’t claw them out. So, instead, I blurted the first thing I could say, “Black Tea!” which I learned I really liked, too.
Another time I was at a diner on Cape Cod and it was my turn to order and I knew I would not be able to say the food I wanted. I looked at the menu and then looked up at the waitress and then looked back at the menu.
I felt her watching me. “What would you like, honey?”
I started to sweat. Others at the table were staring.
I considered silently pointing at my choice, but that would look weird, I thought.
I wished that the waitress could read my mind as I looked at her pleadingly, but that didn’t pan out.
So, once again, I blurted out the first thing I saw: “The Black Ivan!”
She smiled and moved on.
“What the hell is a Black Ivan?” a friend asked.
I had no idea. I lied and said I couldn’t decide what I wanted so I just selected the first thing I saw.
We laughed and “The Black Ivan” became the name we used for the moments when we felt too indecisive to make a decision.
Then there was my gymnastics coach: Mr. Short. I simply could not say “mister” and “Short” together without stuttering. So, instead, I’d shout, “Hey, Short!”
Annoyed, he’d correct the casual way a pre-teen dared to address his coach.
“It is MISTER Short, Patrick.”
“Sorry,” I said, shrinking a few inches each time I was corrected.
Eventually, I just stopped asking him for help.
All things considered, though, I’ve learned to live with my stutter, and as I treat my PTSD, my stutter has dwindled too.
I eventually became a newspaper reporter and then a high school English teacher. Most of the people in my life have no idea I stutter.
And although it has taken time, I can say I have somewhat accepted this part of myself. I say “somewhat” because I still feel embarrassed when I stutter and I still avoid situations that exacerbate my speech impediment.
Yet, as I learned to get by in the talking world, a few years back, I began to worry about my five-year-old son. He had certain quirks of speech.
(He is now nine and has grown out of these quirks.)
But, at the time, he would leave big gaps between words — holes he filled with “yep, yep, yep” — and other times he repeated words or sentences over and over as he tried to carve out his meaning.
When I was a boy, my father would become impatient with me, telling me to “spit it out!” or “slow down!” which of course didn’t work. It just made me more anxious.
He also laughed at me, treating me like a handsome (I was a cutie) but dumb child.
When my son was struggling, some relatives and friends would tell him to “just say it.”
In these moments, I’d flashback to my boyhood, feeling ashamed and embarrassed.
So, I’d gently tell my relatives and friends to stop.
“Let him talk at his own speed,” I’d say.
I never want my sons to feel as I did. I have two sons, and my other boy has a slight lisp and struggles with certain sounds.
So when they speak, I listen.
I appreciate their voices, no matter how they sound.
When my oldest would stutter and have his false starts and backtracks, I watched him make his crooked way toward being understood. I never told him to spit it out and I never finished his sentences.
It ended up that my son would grow out of these struggles, and he is now an articulate nine-year-old who speaks English and Spanish fluently.
From my experiences in childhood and as a father, I learned three important things we should do to help our children find their way through language. (Of course, this would also include getting speech therapy when needed.)
- Be patient. Give children a chance to find their meaning. Allow them to fumble and test out words and sentences as they build their ability to speak.
- Don’t judge. Do not assume a child’s difficulty with language means he does not have his own views and ideas. Too often, we equate one’s ability to speak fluently with one’s intelligence. Not only is this untrue, it hurts a child’s intellectual growth.
- Do not finish their sentences. Do not assume you know what a child is going to say simply because you can speak more fluently. Let them say their piece, no matter how bumpy the ride is.
And, while you’re at it, please do the same for adults like me. There are more than 70 million stutterers worldwide who struggle to be understood.
Please give us a chance.
