First Words

Ilaria is one of the new people in the world. My step-great granddaughter is now 10 months, 2 weeks old. Just about the time for the miracle of words to come chirping out of her mouth. First comes parroting and then …… paragraphs in which she will name her garden and know the power of language.

The video sent to us has her almost repeating CAT as her father points to their furry pet. Four years from now she may recognize a Catalpa tree with its heart-shaped leaves. The growth that shall occur will be in leaps and she may be unrecognizable as the butterfly is from the caterpillar. Nothing prepares us for all this. We witness it with wonder…. if we haven’t lost our awe to the geopolitical Catastrophic Cataclysm. But let’s not go there.

Where I find myself going is back to the process of acquiring early speech which went on when my ex-wife and I taught our daughter how to speak. We discovered Janice was congenitally deaf when she was about 20 months. It took almost another year for her say her first word.

Unlike with hearing children the word was not denotative. It was to be an action word which gave her a sense of dominion, of moving her world. The word was Open. Under the guidance of instructors at the John Tracy Clinic we created a number of situations with doors, windows, lids, caps and ultimately our arms. She was urged to say the word in order to effect a change. Open was a good first word; it welcomed the world.

We not only had to get her to make eye contact but also to place her fingers on our mouths and feel the breath of the P. It was demanding on her but we persisted until it all clicked. Maybe there was a moment of sudden recognition that people spoke and sounds were being made which she could not access like others. And these openings and closings of mouths resulted in something called speech and communication. It must have been both a trauma and an epiphany for her. An Oy and an Aha maybe at the same time. 

My guess is it came incrementally and that hers would be a different path. Over time she would learn to hear with her eyes. She now sees more than I have ever heard. She notices a frown and how my nostrils flare, so I'm told, when I'm trying to be funny. Janice's fingers have written more poems in the air than I have ever composed on paper. 

At some point her receptive and expressive language grew exponentially but still not sufficient to express or receive abstract thoughts. There are far too many ideas which cannot be visually re-created. Her conceptual development required signing and finger spelling. She picked it up from peers and soon her fingers flew like small birds uncaged.

From Ilaria words will also fly. Her babble and gurgle will make the earth move in ways beyond my imaginings. Some day I will look to her for instructions of how to make sense of this world. I’m reminded there is nothing to suggest a sprouting of wings in the crawl of a caterpillar.