When it was obvious that my speech
problem wasn’t going away, my mother and I started arguing about it. No one
knew what was wrong with my speech, but I never suspected I had anything to do
with it. Yet, my mother wound up blaming me for the problem. Although I never
fully believed her, I was vulnerable and began to question myself about it.
Each time I couldn’t speak, which was almost always, I would think, “Why can’t
I do this? Maybe Mommy’s right.”
I moved out of my parent’s house when I was eighteen.
My mother protested but I was weary of seeing the look in her face everyday
that told me my speech problem was my fault. She never used the word, but I
felt like a failure in my mother’s eyes. On one hand it made me very sad, and
on the other I knew that her attitude was killing me.
Although I was living on my own, I still spoke with
my mother often and she always made me feel like there was something wrong with
me. I wanted to get away from her blaming me but instead I turned it on myself.
I knew I had to stop seeing myself as a failure and rebuild my confidence, but
I didn’t know how. My self-image was so damaged that I began doing drugs and
hanging out with the wrong people. I lived like that for two years until I
decided, almost on a whim, to move two thousands miles away to California.
It was August 1968 when I moved to
Berkeley. Even though it was an opportunity to make a fresh start, I didn’t. I
continued to experiment with drugs and developed relationships with others who
did the same. This went on for a few years until one evening when I witnessed a
horrific drug experience. Someone paid dearly for shooting heroin and what I
saw terrified me.
It registered almost instantly
that, whatever the reason was for my speech problem, I didn’t want to keep
punishing myself for it. I now fully understood that what I saw happen to
another drug user could easily happen to me. Almost overnight I stopped doing
drugs, dropped all the friends and acquaintances associated to that world,
moved to a new place, and decided to finish college. It might have been the
first time in my life that I realized how much I cared about myself. Perhaps I
had hit bottom and this was the catalyst to finally give myself the nurturing I
needed.
A year later I was working and attending college full
time. Although I was moving forward and improving myself, I still felt a sense
of frustration and failure around my speech. This especially happened each time
I spoke with my mother on the phone. Finally, in my thirties and shortly before
her death, I noticed that I didn’t even question myself if I felt my mother
judging me harshly or blaming me for the unusual way that I struggled to speak.
It had taken years but I finally realized that I didn’t have to play the blame
game anymore. The endless cycle of her laying blame on me and then laying it on
myself was over.
Interestingly, I felt vindicated when I was finally
diagnosed and told that I have a severe speech disability. I was fifty-one
years old but getting a diagnosis was such an emotional experience that it
brought up the blame I had felt so much in the past. There was still a little
of it stuck to my soul.
My doctors were very hopeful that treatments and
therapy would help me to speak normally again, but the scars left from being
blamed for something I never did or created were still there. A part of me
still felt unworthy of ever being whole.
In time I was able to speak almost normally and, more
than ten years since my diagnosis, I still can. Most of the feelings I
accumulated from being blamed for my speech problem have subsided. But, once in
a while, if I’m very anxious or scared, that old feeling of unworthiness may
surface for a short time. I now put it to bed quickly. I know that it doesn’t
belong in my head, and the words of blame laid on me for my speech problem
should never have been said.
