Growing Girls (13 page)

We talk like her. We say “gonkey.” We say “gog.” We say “gilk.” We merge her language with ours.

There’s a boy in her preschool class who every day wears a large train conductor’s hat that sits just barely above his eyes. He hides beneath that hat, never looking at the other children, rarely participating in their play. Usually, when I drop Sasha
off, I see him by himself, eyes gazing downward. When I run into his mother I wonder why she looks as content as she does. I want to say, “Your boy is not ready for school.” I want to say, “There is something wrong with your son.” She kisses him and tells him she loves him and happily goes away, down the hallway, and into her day.

One day I was assigned the job of “Craft Mom” for the class Christmas party and I was handing out the green and pink foam triangles and the glitter and the glue. When I came upon the boy in the train conductor’s hat, he didn’t grab at the goods as all the other kids did. He didn’t respond at all. He sat on his hands, dropped his chin to his chest.

“Would you like to make an ornament, honey?” I said. “Would you, huh? Would you?”

He burst into terrified tears. The teacher came to his rescue, carried him off. When she came back I said I was sorry. I gave her the eyes that said, “But what is wrong with that boy?”

“He loves it here,” she said with a shrug. “His mother pulled him out for a month, and he begged to come back.”

So I don’t know. Maybe nothing is wrong with that boy. Maybe he’s just working all this out the way he needs to work it out. I look at others. I look at a girl who is pigeon-toed; they say give it time and it will correct itself. I look at a kid with a patch over one eye; the doctors are trying to get that lazy other eye working. I look at skinny kids with buck teeth and plump kids who seem to always be sweating and I look at a girl puffing her asthma medication. I think of all the ways kids grow in fits and starts, like plants with extra shoots you have to lop off or bent stems you must stake. And I think none of this is so
weird, this is just the way growth happens. So Sasha has her problem and they have theirs and we all end up in the same place, taking buses to work or driving our cars or hailing cabs and trying to get through the day so we can get home at a decent hour and have a plate of spaghetti.

So much worry and fuss and people just go on becoming people, more or less.

Verbal apraxia is also called childhood apraxia of speech, and developmental apraxia of speech, and verbal dyspraxia. It bothers me that the people in charge can’t seem to agree on a name. It seems to me that if you’ve taken on the task of fixing kids with problems planning speech, you would engender a lot more confidence if you’d call your cronies and plan your own speech better.

The key is the root word
praxis
, which means “intended movement.” Stroke victims can become apraxic in speech and in fine-motor movement and in gross-motor movement, too. The brain simply loses the ability to properly sequence voluntary actions.

Verbal apraxia is a disorder of the nervous system. A child with the diagnosis of verbal apraxia can’t consistently position the articulators (face, tongue, lips, jaw) for the production of speech sounds and for sequencing those sounds into syllables or words. There is nothing wrong with the muscles themselves. The child doesn’t, for instance, have difficulty chewing or swallowing or sticking out her tongue at her sister. However, the area of the brain that tells the muscles how to move and what to do to make a particular sound or series of sounds is damaged
or not fully developed. This makes retrieving the “motor plan” for saying a word difficult.

Even though the child knows what she wants to say, she cannot say it correctly on command. Sometimes she can’t even begin. Either the wrong sound comes out, or many sounds are left out all together. The motor plan is simply not accessible. These errors are not under the child’s voluntary control, so she typically can’t correct them, even when trying her hardest. Frequently, a child will be able to produce a sound or word at one time and not be able to say it again when she wants to.

Kids don’t grow out of this, in the way they might pigeon-toes or a crippling shyness. Intensive speech therapy, at least three times a week, is necessary for anything approaching success. It’s not a quick fix. Most apraxic children will be in therapy at least two years and sometimes significantly longer. The reason it takes so long is because a lot of the patterns of normal speech have to be deliberately programmed into the child’s brain. This takes repetition and repetition and repetition. And all kinds of tricks the average parent would have no way of coming up with on her own. Sasha needs more than just auditory prompts to get her to make certain sounds. For her, tactile cues help. The “n” sound was completely beyond her grasp tor years. Anna was Alia and nut was gut and nose was gose.

One day Miss Sandy took Sasha’s finger and placed it on the side of her own nose. She then said words that contained “n,” encouraging her to feel the vibration. She did the same using Sasha’s nose and coached and coached and coached.

“Ma! Watch this!” Sasha said, at dinner that night. She put her finger on her nose and said, “Anna,” clear as day.

For months every “n” word required her to stop and think and repeat the trick with her finger. Eventually, she could do it with no finger at all.

This is the way it has gone, one sound at a time and one sequence at a time and if you were to stop and look at the whole picture you would feel like an ancient Egyptian standing by a pile of rocks with some pharaoh standing over you with a drawing of a giant pyramid saying, “Here. Now build me one of these.”

But normally I don’t feel like that. Perhaps feeling like that is a more honest dealing with the disability.

Recently, I find myself reading everything I can get my hands on about apraxia. I think being a three-year-old who can’t talk isn’t such a burden but being a four-year-old who can’t talk is starting to get knotty. I read some parents reporting that super-high doses of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids have brought the gift of speech to their apraxic kids. I think how desperate and pathetic it is to believe in miracles, in one breath, and in the next find myself calling Alex at work and asking him to stop at GNC for a bottle.

They don’t know what causes apraxia, but some people say brain damage and some would say the orphanage did it. Or the ghost-mother who left her on the steps of that pharmacy. Or just the combination of so much hardship for such a tiny baby.

Nobody knows and no one will ever know, so I don’t see the point of concocting stories, although the truth is it takes a lot
more energy to stop myself from concocting. For the worried parent the imagination is always a bully to tame, and for the parent who fears her child has been victimized: look out. At times I feel an anger toward the orphanage workers, toward all the ghosts, that turns into brittle, hot rage. But I have no characters with which to begin to invent a plot. Not one. To make them up is to invent tragedy. To invent! Discipline is the only way I’ve learned to shut down the imagination, to walk away from it, the voice of cool restraint, like a buddy yanking his friend away from the clenches of the cruel heckler. Just walk away.
Walk away
.

It’s not that I’m against fighting. It’s just that there’s no one there to fight. No one from Sasha’s earliest days but spirits in the wind. If I throw my punches into the air, scream at what I imagine is left of their scent, go militant for the sake of my child, I turn my child into a victim. I set a stage featuring poor Sasha, the pathetic little orphan with the sad story and the malnourished body and the bald head and now look at her, she can’t even talk.

Poor Sasha.

At four years old, she is anything but that character. She has no sense of herself as some sorry object of pity. She is, simply, Sasha. A popular kid with a ready laugh and two best friends and a sister and a gonkey.

I’m trying to figure out whether or not I should sign us up for China school again next year. We flunked out last year. That
was a shame. I was giddy with love and goodness and multicultural awareness that hot September Sunday when we climbed the concrete steps into the community college.

What a thrill it was to walk into that basement registration room filled with people from China. All ages, men, women, kids. Hearing their excited chatter, the urgent utterances of a language I could not understand, all that dark hair and those almond eyes and those cheekbones jutting out like windowsills. All of it. It made my heart pound with a nostalgia for the stinky Guangdong airport, the crowd, the luggage carts bashing into unsuspecting ankles, Alex wrapping duct tape around our duffel bag brimming with souvenirs. A baby on my hip. Leaving home. Going to America. Going home.

Standing in that community college basement, I wondered if my girls felt anything, any link at all. Did they remember these eyes and these cheeks and these sounds? Was any of this familiar?

“Girls, look at all the Chinese people!” I said, stupidly. Perhaps if I gave them a boost, they would recognize something of themselves in these people.

But: nothing. Anna was coloring in her Care Bears coloring book and Sasha was intent on biting hard enough to get into the Tootsie part of her Tootsie Pop.

Well, okay. One of the reasons I signed us up for Chinese school was so that, someday, if my daughters ever wanted some of their Chinese-ness, they would have access.

This is something a lot of people who adopt from China do, some more, some less. I’m one of the less. At least so far. I’m not sure where to stand on this one, how to encourage without
forcing, where the line between treading gingerly stops and turns into avoidance. When we first came home with Anna, we took her to a Chinese New Year party hosted by a group of parents with kids from China. All at once a drum sounded and out popped a giant dragon with a giant head and it began to dance around the banquet hall. Anna wasn’t the only child to scream in fear, but she may have been the loudest and was certainly the least consolable. We took her out of the room and huddled with her behind the lobby door where she could at least peek at the dragon if she wanted to, but she reached in fear for the outdoors with pleading arms and tears anyone would understand, so we left.

China school was a class for kids—you had to be at least three to enroll—with their parents, which Alex and I thought was perfect. In our family we speak of China as a shared family heritage. We adopted it when we adopted our girls. Learning the language together would be a symbolic expression of that, as well as a literal one.

So there we sat in school together, Mom, Dad, Kikki, and Et, the whole family seated in Room 116. This, I figured, would be a beautiful family experience.

“Put the desk down,” I said to Sasha, who was only just discovering the thrill of opening and closing a community college desk, that hinge mechanism particularly terrific.

“Yook!” she said. “Gum!” Many colors of gum, in fact, under that desk, some still ripe enough for Sasha to poke her fingers into.

“Put. The. Desk. Down.”

The teacher, an energetic woman with square shoulders,
greeted the class quickly and launched immediately into the day’s lesson and soon enough marched up to Anna and said, “Zhe shi shenme?” while pointing to her nose.

Anna, who was busy drawing cats, looked at me as if she was about to cry. “Zhe shi shenme?” the teacher said again. The question, I’m pretty sure, meant, “What is this?” In a stroke of genius, or because the little boy next to me had just responded to this drill with success, I spoke on behalf of my daughter when I said, “Zhe shi bizi.”

“Pizza?”
the teacher said, turning to the class. “Does my nose look like a pizza?”

But I didn’t say “pizza,” I said “bizi,” with a soft “b” and the final “i” going up in tone, just as she had said it. She said it again. “Bizi,” I mimicked.

“No, not a pizza!” she shouted, to the continued delight of the twenty-five people gathered there that day. “This is a
language
class,” she then reminded us. “Everyone here has to have pronunciation! Also, everyone here has to respect the teacher otherwise the teacher get very, very upset, okay?”

“Okay,” Alex said, as if to apologize for the entire family. She turned to him. “Zhe shi shenme?” she said, pointing to her eye.

“Um,” he said. “Hong?”

She paused, pursed her lips, refusing to even register that answer, then moved on to the girl with the long red hair raising her hand eagerly. “Zhe shi yanjing!” the girl said perfectly.

“I think you called her eye a rainbow,” I told Alex.

Right-o. So we were the dolt family. I kept thinking there must have been more of a
beginner
beginner class, but when I checked the registration form to see what was going on in
Room 115,1 saw this was it. The class for three-year-olds was as beginner as it got.

“Sasha! Get your fingers out of the gum! Put. The. Desk. Down.”

In our defense, many of the people in the class had taken this beginner course two and three times before, so the fact that we were so very far in the dark in hour one of day one of a semester-long course should not have been so terribly discouraging. And so what if Sasha got nothing out of this beyond a little family bonding with Chinese language going on in the background? And the fact of the matter was that I was proud of Anna for already learning a tremendous lesson in self-control in that she was not, as she repeatedly requested, just going at that giant green chalkboard with those giant sticks of chalk with which she could draw giant cats.

So, this was fine. This was a beautiful family experience, all right. I listened to the music of the class counting from one to twenty in Chinese, absorbing the wonder, relaxing into the mystery. Then, in one swift motion, Sasha escaped from her desk, darted up to the teacher with a page of scribble she had ripped out of her notebook. “Teacher!” she was shouting, although it came out, “Tee-teetch!” “A present!” she was saying, although it came out, “A prize!” Alex took off after her, and then Anna after Alex, but Anna tripped over the foot of a man in the middle row and landed right on her bizi, which has always had a tendency to bleed, and so I waited.