Communication

There’s a scene in the move Mr. Holland’s Opus where the main character, Mr. Holland, and his wife are arguing over their son’s education. They’ve just learned that he is hearing impaired and as they argue there son sits on the floor playing not aware of what his parents are doing or saying. In frustration Mr. Holland’s wife yells, “I want to talk to my son!”

That scene has always struck me. And now it does more than ever. I’m not a crier but if I were to watch that right now I would cry. I’m near tears just thinking about it.

My son can hear. Not perfectly. But he can hear. He can also speak. Not perfectly. But he can speak. My son can’t articulate very well. He has lower tone in his face muscles making the formation of words harder than I can try to imagine.

I just want to talk to him. The kind of talk where not one does he understand all I’m saying, because I really think he understands everything, but he can relate all he understands. The kind of talk that I can understand him.

I do talk to him, and he talks back. More often than he should, probably. But he often rambles off long streams of sentences and I often times have no idea what he’s saying. He says a lot of words of phrases that I’ve learned what he means. Some of them sound correctly but some don’t. Sometimes he’ll say the same thing over and over to me when I’m not understanding it. When I don’t get it he tries spelling it. If I weren’t so intent on trying to figure out what he’s saying I think I’d break down into tears. Sometimes the spelling it out works and sometimes it doesn’t. If I think too much about it my hearts breaks.

He gets angry at me a lot. Some of it, I know, is him stretching that independence. Trying to no longer be just one of my extensions, his own person. That’s hard for an over protective, hovering mom sometimes. Some of it, I know, is the fact that he isn’t understood. That all these things he tries to tell us fall on our deaf ears.

I have a lot of guilt over the fact that we didn’t learn about his hearing issues sooner. That he didn’t get his hearing aides sooner. I feel guilt over the fact that I didn’t want him to have an assistive communication device at school because I was afraid it would stop encouraging him to speak. I’m seeing now that he needs one. Guilt is nasty business. It feeds and festers and takes on a life of it’s own.

Down syndrome is hard sometimes.

I just want to talk to my son.