At my youngest son's most recent wellness visit, I surprised myself.
His pediatrician asked the standard question which usually signals that the appointment's nearly done, "and do you have any concerns?"
I had to acknowledge that no, I didn't this time. I was feeling much more relaxed than I had in this very seat a couple years ago. Back then, the answer to that question was keeping me up at night.
When Elliott was 18 months old, I began to get curious about his budding ability to talk. Was it on par with where it should be? It was so hard to tell at that stage. Speech is really just taking off by then, and the only context that parents are usually given to judge it by is the total number of words your toddler can say.
What doesn't help is that all official resources remind you over and over again that there is an enormous range of what's considered normal early on. So many encourage you to just "wait and see," the implication being that they'll start generating more speech naturally, without structured help.
For a few months, I did wait and in the meantime we read every book we could get our hands on.
Elliott wasn't as chatty and engaging with words as Henry had been at that age, but I also considered how different his personality is from his older brother's. Henry is everybody's friend instantly. Elliott is slower to warm up to people, though once he finds someone he completely trusts, he will chatter away--granted someone lesser known isn't trying to listen in at the same time.
By a couple months from his second birthday, I grew very frustrated with the wait and see approach. Words weren't compounding yet, even though we read to him all the time and talked with him tons.
Looking back, I'm glad I started investigating when I did, because there was still more waiting to be done.
We had to wait for him to officially turn two for two reasons.
One, most speech therapists won't assess a child's speech abilities before that age because of said wide range of abilities noted earlier. Two, we needed to attend his wellness visit and request a doctor's prescription to get begin working with a qualified, insurance-network-approved speech therapist.
Even though Elliott's pediatrician could find no indication that his speech was abnormal or not on track, he luckily gave us the blessing to go seek early intervention because he trusted my motherly intuition.
Then it took time to get on that therapist's schedule, have an assessment and get the results back. Once we decided that we'd like to go with a different therapist, it felt a bit like starting all over again.
The first speech therapist to assess Elliott could tell that he had a delay, but lacked the social or professional skills to describe it to us in a way that didn't feel alarming.
The next therapist began by merely asking us if he had any words at all--yes? Great! Once all the assessment and insurance things were sorted out, she simply focused on the process and the progress. With time, she has helped us begin to focus on the those things too, rather than being fixated on "graduating him out."
As the mama, I've experienced some grief with this phase.
First I've had to attempt to get over my feelings of failure--more than once. It's hard to pin down where a speech delay came from, but that doesn't stop the mom guilt.
One of my all-time favorite things to do with Elliott and his brother are to read to them. All the time. Everyday, pretty much everywhere. That's all they tell new parents to do to encourage new speech, and by golly that is a box that has been checked.
With time, I've begun to let go of the feeling that I failed him somehow, though waves of it still come back. In its place, I've started to embrace with new depth the understanding that every child is truly different, and that this has zero bearings on how smart he is.
We're finally to a stage where that's being pointed out by preschool teachers and other adults he interacts with. He's got a math-savvy brain that delights in puzzles. He has such high powers of observation that leave me and my husband cackling at the things we would have missed entirely had he not pointed it out.
Since we learned of Elliott's speech delay, I've encountered a lot of misunderstandings about it. Even now, the best way I can describe it is that what many kids tend to pick up naturally--learning to say many different sounds all at the same time or in seemingly no particular order--is something that my child has to learn manually, broken up into separate pieces and over time. He has to address one thing and master it before moving on to the next one.
And Elliott has. He's made so much progress in two years. These days, most people who don't already know us wouldn't be able tell that he's in speech therapy. Because the kid talks and talks and can be loud and obnoxious in the way the typical 4-year-old can be when demanding your full attention.
Now we are doing work on specific speech sounds that have gotten confused in the communication from the brain to the tongue.
What can be overwhelming as a parent is knowing that to "catch up" to his peers, Elliott has to work harder or more intentionally on these skills than the average kid his age. That can be discouraging for me when I think of it that way. So, for now, I choose to remember our victories:
Somehow, against the odds of not having the proper resources to figure it out too quickly, we were able to determine he had a speech delay and that allowed us to get him help as soon as possible.
This school year, he has had the added benefit of being around more kids his age, which is a helpful thing for learning to talk, in addition to a separate, school-assigned speech therapist.
Oddly enough, that has unlocked an important piece of my mom guilt. More and more, I allow my husband to help when it comes to his speech "homework," and suddenly with two therapists and his help too, it's much lighter. It's not just me responsible for rolling the boulder up the hill. Now Elliott has a small but effective team.
Knowing I'm not the only one working on it gives me peace that when he "gets there" matters less than the fact that he can now clearly speak for himself and it will only get better from here.