Sunday morning, I wake up with everyone in one bed. My daughter came in sometime last night after midnight and my wife has fallen asleep while my son was nursing. There’s no way I could get out of here without waking everyone up.
The cloudy morning light is coming in through the blinds. We sleep with them down now, which seems anathema to me after a lifetime of sleeping next to windows, positioning my bed as close to them as possible to look up into the sky before sleeping. Now the room is nightly closed off against the clank of the dumpsters and the glare of the streetlights outside and then sealed over in the sound of rain from the computer: an unbelievable sound which becomes static after a few moments---like how even the best cup of coffee loses its flavor and becomes hot liquid after the first few sips.
It must be about 7 when everyone wakes up. I could probably stay, but I’ve got a few things I’d like to get out of the way. My wife is disappointed; once again, she’s got a morning of watching two kids who need constant attention. She probably doesn’t even taste the first sip of coffee. Besides, it’s hard keeping a hot cup away from kids’ hands; her coffee tends to get cold in out-of-reach places.
I ride up the hill. Still continuing the obnoxious habit I started a few days ago of thinking of homes that were for sale last year, or the year before, and their prices. All of them seemingly affordable now; all of them eminently livable and beyond reach.
The part of the ride down Bay Side Rd. is a reprieve. No houses have ever been for sale on this road and everything is in bloom. A doe out eating the blossoms stretches herself languorously across the road with tentative hooves for the macadam. Even through my stuffed nose, I can make out the apple blossoms: the smell of a cloudy day.
As I coast down the hill, I think of the conversation my wife and I had the night before. For months the information has been piling up, accounts coming in, that our daughter doesn’t speak as she’s supposed to. The way she drops ‘S’s and ‘F’s, it turns out, is not some quaint idiosyncrasy of development, something to be worked out later, but rather potentially indicative of a problem.
I hadn’t given any credence to this idea. She’s my little girl. She speaks the charming way she does. She—like all children—is perfect. I also didn’t want to open the box on potential problems that tends to spill out from getting oneself involved in systems. Any system is a sleeping giant. Kafka tried to explain this to us. You wake one up—even unintentionally—and you become ensnared. A system ensnared my family when I was a child. It bound them to the working definitions of autism, even though the system had no understanding of autism—but, like all systems, it is incapable of professing ignorance or even being ignorant.
The thought of those interminable institutional corridors, those bureaucrats, councilors and functionaries wrapping around my little girl, making decisions for my family is really more than I can handle. So, I tell myself she’s fine. Her speech is her own and it’s fine.
Still coasting down the hill, I think how paranoid this all seems. I tell myself to lighten up and to stay open. Systems are often benign if not completely ineffective, and of course, I start thinking about the near-impossibility of communicating effectively within them, much less to them. Sleeping giants, indeed. The greatest people must be the Quixotes who try to change the systems, the Sisyphuses who put their shoulders to these rock-like systems.
She articulates complex thoughts; she responds in novel ways. She’s creative in her speech. There may not be an ‘S’s or ‘F’s and even some consonant clusters are difficult, but there’s no reason to subject ourselves to something fraught with danger. Oh! I’m going back and forth on this again!
…
My sister didn’t make eye contact as a child. She didn’t talk. In her early development, she might have said a few words, but these seem to come almost unbidden, as if they surprised even her when uttered.
One such instance I can’t forget was her use of the word ‘bubble’. We must’ve been very young because we were in the bath together. She looked off into the space where she was so comfortable resting her gaze, away from everyone and everything, and named the frothy soap around us. The two sounds of ‘bubble’ are the only intentional syllables I ever heard my sister use; they were just as ephemeral as the object itself. Nothing led away from this utterance. When she said it, she returned to her customary silence, though both my mother and I shouted encouragement. After such a performance, it was hard not to.
Now I understand that it may have been this encouragement that disallowed for further speech, even stopped it up. Maybe it was hard for her to repeat the performance. Maybe she didn’t say the word for us.
…
I go into the café. There’s frost on the window panes, but the sun is already starting to warm them and to cast long shadows from the rhododendron bushes up the walls. I sit down to work and immediately start to think of what’s happening at home. I see my wife, her coffee cold, picking up one kid and putting another down. I see my son, belly down on the floor, pumping his arms like a bird, smiling with the half-dazed look of infants, but I don’t see my daughter so much as I hear her. It’s something that’s been playing over and over in my head: the memory of her introducing herself to a kid at the park.
“My name e eme”
“Huh?” the kid replies and looks confused. She repeats it, but the kid doesn’t understand, shrugs his shoulders and runs off to play with someone else. She watches him run, but stays rooted to the spot.
…
A week later. My son wakes up at six and I take him for a walk after I’ve made coffee. The sun is coming up through the clouds. I’m walking north, but each time I come to a cross street, I see the pink and orange skies between the buildings. There’s no one out and the birds aren’t singing so much as they’re muttering to each other. Sleepy chirpings.
We leave all five blocks of downtown behind and climb up the slight hill on the north side of 11th Street. It’s not much of a rise, but it’s sufficient to get above the 1 and 2 story buildings and see the Bay reflecting the rest of the calm sunrise. The clouds have given the light a syrupy quality and it runs in channels of color from the east and disappears in the Bay. Over the water the sky is a tarnished mirror, oval and silver-gray.
My son is quiet the entire walk. There’s a frost on the ground so his little hands, dangling from the carrier are cold. I take them in my hands and warm them. He glances at me and returns to looking around. From his stationary position in the carrier, he watches the hedges march past, the parked cars drift by, the buildings float by like clouds. We walk for over an hour, from end to end of this tiny town and he doesn’t make a sound. His observant role doesn’t require commentary. I listen to his silence and think how often what we say only muddles what we feel. How there are seldom right words and a right occasion. To some degree, our talking is all so much problem-making. Our struggle to name, describe and critique what’s around us only gets us lost in our phrasing: the limitations of our language. As language results from experience, what leverage can it possibly offer for escaping that experience? Perhaps it is only setting up and tearing down the same structure over and over.
Listening to the silence around me; speaking to my son in this silence, it seems utterly absurd that I should ever ask anyone to teach my daughter to speak when she is the only one who can define her experience in words.
Walking back down the hill, I long to bring her this news. I want to tell my wife, too. We don’t need to worry! Words are only a great piling up of history and rules and the perspectives of the past. We’re making our own language, the record our own experience. But, then I come down among the buildings and see the letters, the words, the names and see how it’s another system and one that we’re all hopelessly ensnared in, one in which the expression “my name e eme” falls on deaf ears.
