With nouns and names primarily, put together into her own combinations, or not.
With words that sound like something else, another word or not a word.
But if you listen to her say it enough times, if she repeats it enough times, giving you all the clues she can, you might eventually get it. You might not. She will be okay with that most of the time because she has learned that’s how it goes with the way she talks.
She will greet you but not with ‘hi’ or ‘how are you?’. She can say these words but when she sees you she will likely point and say ‘name’. It will sound like ‘nay’ but if you are very clever you will get it. If you think about it you will understand she wants to know you. She wants to talk to you. She just wants to connect. She wants to know your name. This is how she talks.
She will say ‘no’ or ‘not’ when she means the opposite and those who don’t know won’t know and that is how she talks. She may tell you that she has ‘changed her mind’ and say ‘yes’, which sounds a bit like ‘no’, until you start to hear the difference. Having ‘no’ as her default is much preferable to the alternative. This is something I think about when I consider the way she talks.
Do you watch a show tonight mommy?
What’s happening today?
I be mad.
This is how she talks. In sentences with many words but often only one. You can ask her to tell you more and maybe she will give you another word, another name or change streams altogether.
There are words she will just say because they are easy to say but neither of us believe they were what she wanted to say so we wait and somewhere along the way the words she was waiting for appear off the tip of her tongue or from some other part of it, not always the ‘correct’ place. With effort and time. This is how she talks.
She has a talker to augment and embellish what her voice can tell you. She uses it when she chooses and it may or may not help you sort out what she’s thinking about. Or it may be just the thing needed to connect the dots. It is a tool that is necessary, even when it hasn’t been used all day. It is an integral part of how she talks.
She has had some therapy and she has had a speech therapist as her mom and it has not necessarily been ‘enough’ and she will likely never get ‘enough’. Also it is true that we haven’t tried, we don’t try as hard as some parents do to give her more. We could try harder and she could get more. And would it be the thing, the thing that makes it easier for strangers to understand her when she goes up to them and inquires ‘name’? Would that word-final consonant used correctly be the difference between a look of confusion and a response of recognition, friendliness and encouragement? Would more hours with the right therapist spending more time getting more compliance and more repetitions and more practice with the motor plans and the phonology and the syntax and the pragmatics be the thing to bring her friends and community and ease through all her life? Or is there another factor, another entity that makes the biggest difference to her being an effective communicator? Could it have more to do with her communication partners than her disability?
I have learned through the years the difference between having an influence on her development and having control over it. It is when I confuse these two ideas that I find myself the most at odds with my parenting. This is how she talks, and I can’t (and don’t want to) control her words. This is how she talks and I have an influence on whether she continues to adjust her ways of communicating as she learns and grows.
As for you, when you hear her talk there will be times when it clicks and times when it doesn’t. Times when there will be someone who knows her better to interpret for you and times when translation services are unavailable. There will be successful exchanges and ones that go nowhere. This is how she talks and most of all she needs you to hear her. This way. Not the way you or I hope or expect she would have talked if only we had just done more, exerted more influence, to make it so. Not in the way that makes it easier for us, makes the conversation less of an effort. In just this way. This is how she talks, and she can teach us all about it, if we take the time to listen.
