to be understood

On average, I see 10-15 kids per day for speech therapy.  Add in 1-2 parents/grandparents/guardians and 1-2 siblings for each, plus all the kids that my 4 co-workers see, and all of their parents/siblings, etc. and what do you get?  Never-ending colds.  Runny nose.  Coughing.  Raspy man voice.  That's what you get.

That's what I had this weekend.  But in an unusually rare form, I actually totally lost my voice for a period of about 24 hours.  Well okay, I could whisper.  But anything louder than a whisper was pretty much impossible.  Conveniently, my family came up from the Tri-cities for the weekend and we all went to a family fun center in Hayden Lake, ID called Triple Play, where we were surrounded by 500+ middle school students who were NOT whispering.  So you can imagine that communicating effectively was a bit of a challenge.

I had so much to say, and yet I couldn't say it.  Ideas, comments, stories...they all popped into my head as the need arose, but I felt powerless to convey them.  So instead I resorted to a combination of gestures, meaningful glances and facial expressions, and even a little American sign language.  Too bad no one in my family actually knows any ASL.  That would have been handy.

This inability to communicate really hit me hard.  It was horrible.  But as I mulled the experience around in my head, it made me realize just how important and how wonderful my job is.  The kids I see in our clinic come for a variety of reasons.  Some aren't able to speak at all.  Some speak with patterns that render them completely unintelligible.  And still others mix up their words in such a way that even the experienced listener finds them difficult to follow.  But all struggle to be understood.  To communicate their wants and their needs, their joys and their sorrows.

We all want to be understood.  It's the basis for our deepest joy: human relationships.  How fulfilling it is to help provide that crucial link to little ones who are in need of it.  Its sometimes a long process.  Much longer than I would like it to be.  Full of bumps in the road, and difficult and even draining days.  But oh so fulfilling.