Repetition

The kitchen is still; nothing but the blip… blip… blip of the leaky sink faucet dripping tiny, repetitive water grenades into a metal pot half full of water.  From its hiding spot amidst a small tribe of used water glasses on the eggshell tile countertop, the black cordless phone rings.  My mother walks in from the bedroom and picks it up, tossing her bleach-blonde hair aside to bring the handset to her ear.  “Hello?”

As strange as it sounds, answering the phone with a quick and decisive “Hello” has been her dream for years.  Aside from her love of gadgetry, my mother has always been a woman of simple desires.  She never wanted money or power.  All she’s ever wanted is to love her God, care for her family and her friends, and be able to say “hello.”  While she has succeeded at the first two, saying this one word has always eluded her.  Nearly every time she picks up the phone and tries to greet the caller, her mouth opens and nothing comes out, sometimes for up to five to ten seconds, until finally she can force out her strained “h-h-hh-h-hhh-Hello” and the sigh—like a deflating balloon—that has almost permanently become a part of her crushed greeting.

My mother stutters, and she has for as long as I can remember.  But as an otherwise ordinary child growing up, going to school, and playing under the California sun, her stutter never bothered me.  I never questioned it, never even really thought about it.  Not until I had to.

One day in second or third grade in the middle of a handwriting exercise, my teacher took me aside to introduce me to a stranger.  I followed the teacher toward a woman in a very professional gray skirt and matching sport coat standing on the class’ story-time carpet in the corner of the room.  I looked up through my huge, face-consuming glasses as the woman bent down to greet me.  Her crinkly black hair swayed forward as she came down toward the ground, bringing her narrow face to my level, her soft eyes focused in behind mine.  She had big teeth, but she looked nice.

“Hi, Josh,” she said, putting one hand on her knee and extending the other for a handshake.  “It’s nice to meet you.  My name is Miss Shannon; I’m the school speech therapist.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what a speech therapist was, or what it was supposed to mean to me, but I was told that she and I would start meeting to talk about stuttering. For reasons I didn’t understand, this excited my mother.

Each week from then on, I got up from my bulky desk, passed around the outside edge of the classroom, and slipped out the side door.  Down the long, open-air hallway I went, passing beside off-white stucco walls of classroom after classroom full of other kids, around the corner at the eastern end of the southern row of classes, and on toward the school office at the end of a covered, shadowy hall.  I’d enter the office and, before meandering into my destination in the far corner of the lobby, I’d get a smile and a “hi Josh” from the receptionist, Miss Dart—a petite blonde whom I seem to remember thinking was rather pretty and would make a good girlfriend.  But, every week, instead of pursuing the romantic possibilities with an older woman, I pressed on to what had to be the smallest room in the school to spend an hour talking with Miss Shannon.

I knocked on the door.

“Come in,” Miss Shannon said, acting as though she was unsure who was outside.  I slid in through the half-open door, and that big smile broke forth again, “Hi, Josh!”

I always sensed that there was something awkward about the way she spoke; she didn’t sound like everyone else.  I now realized that her enunciation was a little too soft and yet slightly too rigid at the same time.  It sounded regulated, as though she was always abiding by her own unspoken rule of clear enunciation, concentrating intently on every syllable that came off her lips.

I sat down in my customary seat, a dingy yellow chair set squarely between piles of papers and stacks of loaded binders.  I was never more than three feet away from her in that office.  In fact, nothing in the office was more than three feet away from her.

Miss Shannon had me read stories, recite tongue twisting-poetry, play strange word games that weren’t much fun, and tell her how I felt when I had to speak in different situations.  Then she’d look back at the clock and say, “time’s up,” and send me back out of the office, down the hall, around the corner, past the other classrooms, and back to mine.  We did this for weeks, perhaps months.

Then one day I came into her office after recess and sat down as usual.  Beside me, on the end table, sat a large, brown tape recorder.  It had a rectangular black hatch toward the back end and a short row of black buttons with various symbols across the front, and was about the size of a Nintendo set.

“I’ve got something new for us to do today,” Miss Shannon began.  “I’ve brought my tape recorder in, and we’re going to tape record you speaking and play it back so you can hear what you sound like.”

It sounded easy enough.  All I had to do was read a poem with this tape recorder in my lap and I’d get to hear myself talk—something most of us like doing, even if we don’t admit it.  She handed me a poem, hit the record button, and I read.

When I was finished with the poem, she stopped the tape and pushed the rewind button.  Hunched over, the recorder in her hands, she looked at me from under her brow.  She wasn’t smiling.  Her lips were drawn concernedly shut as her soft eyes scoured my face.  The tape reeled and whirred wildly to the mechanics of the recorder and then came to a clicking halt.
Miss Shannon pressed play.

When the tape started, a high-pitched voice began to read; it was a voice I’d never heard before: whiny and—well—girlier than I’d expected.  I looked at the recorder, glanced up at Miss Shannon’s knowing eyes, and looked back down at the machine, the tape still spinning inside.  Knowing the voice was mine because we’d just recorded it, I listened on, accepting the tinny tone of my voice as heard from outside my head.

Then something strange happened: the recorded voice stalled.  A few words later, it repeated a syllable for a few seconds before continuing on with the word.  This wasn’t my voice; it couldn’t be.  No, this pitiable, squeaky voice was struggling to speak the poem that I had just read without a problem.  It stumbled over a syllable every few words like a wooden cart wheel bumping, thudding, ricketing over cobblestones.  Any word beginning with S seemed to go on forever, never reaching the next letter.  A’s became no more than a complete halt in the middle of a word, like a door had simply closed in the throat, ending the sound entirely.  Some words went on endlessly, one syllable repeating over and again like the sound of an engine that won’t turn over.  Just a few lines of poetry took this poor voice at least twice the time they should have, twice the time they had taken me.

Or did they?

I slipped out of Miss Shannon’s office that day with my shoulders slumped forward and eyes to the ground.  Past Miss Dart, down the hall, and round the corner, I shuffled back into class, feet dragging as I passed between the islands of desks that dotted the room.  I couldn’t have met eyes with my teacher or classmates if I had wanted to.  I was like a horse with the blinders off, finally seeing the truth that had always been there in the periphery, just outside my hindered vision: something was wrong with me, I didn’t talk like everyone else.  I stuttered.  And for my whole life, I had been the only one who didn’t know it.  I was suddenly the butt of the world’s most elaborate joke.

Though I didn’t recognize it at the time, my stutter didn’t separate me from everyone; there was at least one person who had carried that cumbersome tongue before me. My mother wasn’t in on the world’s gag at my expense, she had actually spent her years trying not to be another punch line and had tried to keep me from being one as well.  She had known about my stutter long before I was cognizant of it; she was aware that her curse had repeated itself in her son, much the same as her words repeated themselves in her mouth.  It made her fear that her disgrace would be mine.

To talk to her about her stuttered history is to hear the voice of a repeatedly defeated woman, one who has tried to stand alone through a shaming battle and is often now a prisoner of her own mouth.  Professionals say that stuttering is hereditary, but neither of my grandparents stuttered.  My mother had no one to knowledgeably stand beside her.
At six years old, she was playing outside with her round-faced brother and a friend one day, wheeling around the neighborhood on their bicycles as quickly as their little legs could carry them while the house was being used for a lady’s afternoon brunch.  Sandy blonde hair fluttering in the wind, my mother pedaled hard down the cracked sidewalk to keep up with the boys.  Putting all her weight into each down-pedal, she noticed a car driving alongside her out of the corner of her eye.  Bicycle gears squeaking, the wheels still spinning, she looked over and met eyes with the middle-aged woman behind the wheel, assuming that some agreement had been made to determine who would go first.  Whether the lady got the message or perhaps was already too far committed to the turn, no one knows, but just as my mother’s little bicycle bounded over the dip into the next driveway, the woman pulled her car into the same driveway.

At maximum six-year-old velocity, my mother, little Connie Yale, slammed her front wheel into the side of the car.  My mother was instantly arched through the air and hurled to the pavement.  Lying on the ground just long enough for adrenaline to flow into her system, she popped up and bolted home on foot, forgetting her wrenched bicycle and ignoring her dislocated hip, sobbing as she ran.

Safe once more in her own house, she balled up in her grandmother’s lap on the floor, crying.  From that day forward, she stuttered.  But she knew it; she could hear it.  And thanks to people who laughed at her from middle school through to adulthood, she never forgot it, it has always been in the front of her mind.

Remembering her own experience, my mother kept tabs on me through school, asking each new teacher how I spoke in class, fearing—from her own experience—that the embarrassment of stuttering would eventually drive me to despair and silence in public, as it often did her.

Every new teacher assured her, however, that there was nothing to fear for me.  “Oh no, he raises his hand in class all the time,” they’d tell her.  “And if he has a hard time with his words, he just talks right on through them, however long it takes.”

Though the initial shock of discovering my stutter was distressing, it was often forgotten, and my little mouth would just keep rolling through my words no matter how many bumps and cracks my tongue fell into along the way.  I was so happily unaware, even tunnel-visioned, that stuttering wasn’t something I often thought about of my own accord.  Only when someone else brought it to my attention: something my mother was always afraid of.

It wasn’t until seventh grade that stuttering became more than I could bear.
Like most kids, I got sick every now and then.  On one of these occasions, my mother called my math teacher, Mr. Nadelborg, to ask for my homework assignment.  In the course of the conversation, she had a hard time getting through numerous words, catching certain syllables and completely locking up others.  Moments of dead air filled Mr. Nadelborg’s receiver.  Eventually she got through the conversation—the singular goal of every stutterer stuck in a stammering fit.

But the next day, while I was out at P.E. after returning to school, that conversation came back to haunt me.

The pavement was hot.  The smell of week-old gym shorts baking under the California sun filled the air around a small horde of sweaty, red-clad junior-high-schoolers doing more jumping jacks than any of us cared to.

Finally the command came to stop and we all fell to rest positions.  Coach Murray (a tall man with a bristly handlebar mustache who always reminded me of Virgil Earp from the movie Tombstone) sent us all off to play volleyball, or football, or basketball, or whatever ‘ball’ happened to be our sporting-good babysitter that day.  We all scattered to our various game-time posts, the sound of obscene pre-teen male commentary filling the yard.  For one reason or another, when I got to the court I was supposed to be at with my team, I realized that I needed to talk to Coach Murray about something, so I wandered over across the blacktop.

Among the noise of boys at play, my sneakered feet must have been nearly silent, because Mr. Murray and Mr. Nadelborg, who had joined him, didn’t hear me coming toward them below the tree.  They went right on laughing at whatever it was they were joking about.  To this day, I don’t remember exactly what they said.  I only know what my mother tells me about what happened an hour later.

I came thumping through the front door and onto the hardwood entryway floor of our house that day in tears, she tells me.  With my mother’s arms closing around me like a shawl and the family dog circling around our legs, I explained through the sobs that I had overheard my math teacher joking with my P.E. coach about the stuttering mother who had called him the previous day.  To fully explain how funny this woman was—who at times could hardly produce a sound—Mr. Nadelborg demonstrated part of the conversation for his coworker, mimicking the woman’s stammer.  They both had a good laugh, just before realizing that a student was standing there: me.

Assuming I hadn’t heard what they were laughing at—or at least hadn’t understood it—Mr. Murray attended to my question as though nothing had happened.  But something had: the mockery my mother had grown up with had fallen to me.

A fire lept up behind my mother’s eyes when I told her the story.  Refusing to allow me to feel the same incompetence she had always felt in speaking, she wasted no time in approaching both teachers to discuss what had happened, telling them in no uncertain terms just how their fun at her impediment would strike a young boy who struggled with the same problem.  One teacher willingly confessed and took me aside after class to apologize to me, the other was eventually coerced to do the same.

My mother sent me a text message on my cell phone a few months back, asking if I’d heard of something called a SpeechEasy, a device that fits into the wearer’s ear like a hearing aid and replicates the sound of the wearer’s voice back into his ear canal on a slight delay.  The notion is that the wearer feels as though he’s in a group reciting something together, an activity proven to lower stress levels and decrease the frequency of the stutter.

Since I’m obviously the person she calls to discuss matters of the tongue, she asked me about it again a few weeks later over the phone, telling me that she wants to get one someday—in spite of the four-thousand-dollar price tag.

“I’m just tired of this,” she said, explaining to me how difficult, and even sometimes impossible, it is for her to communicate with shoppers at the Christian bookstore she works at.  “Customers have actually laughed at me.”

Hearing the despondent sound in her voice, I stopped for a second, staring into the pot of boiling pasta on my stove.  I understood.  Not many people could say it, but I understood.

It’s hard to listen to her talk about it because I know that her stutter was her greatest weakness and shame; it bothers her every time she speaks with someone new, every time she has to give change, every time she picks up the phone—even if she’s just talking to me.

“If money wasn’t an object,” she asked me as I went on making my lunch, “would you want a SpeechEasy?”

I thought about that.  “No,” I said to her.  “I can see why you do, and some days I would say ‘yes’—” I paused and stared at the floor, my back stiffening.  “But I don’t just want to be fixed,” I continued.  I felt the crimson rising into my neck and face.  “Sometimes I just want the stutter to go away so I can get on and sound like everyone else.  Other times I get indignant—I don’t know if it’s courage or just defiance, or what, but I think ‘fine, you want to stop me, stutter?  Well, I’m just going to keep right on talking in spite of you, you little bastard—’” I freeze, having not expected that to come out.

We both sit silent on the ends of the line, letting my unintentional words sink in.

“You’ve always been like that,” she finally says.  “I’ve always been impressed by the way you never let your stutter get in your way.  Even as a kid, you just said whatever you wanted to say; it never stopped you.  But, I can’t do that.  I’m tired of stuttering.”

Stammering has been the thorn in my mother’s mouth for nearly her entire life—stalling, stopping, locking, repeating.  But the repetition of her stutter, as hard as it is to live with, isn’t something that I’m without thankfulness for.  Though I wouldn’t wish a faulty tongue on anyone, I also wouldn’t want to think of a life of stuttering alone, because the emotional isolation it creates is unyielding.  As a young, inexperienced stutterer, I needed the protection of my mother’s ever-vigilant eye watching for troubles that I couldn’t foresee. And as a long-time, weather-beaten victim of her own tongue, she needed the not-yet-deterred courage of my persistent speech and the purpose of defending me.

The one benefit of our repetition is that neither of our sounds stands alone.