I’m a Little Tongue-tied
I hated doctors appointments.
Stick your tongue out. Can it go farther?
The doctors always commented on my short tongue. But what they never noticed was that I could never touch my soft palate on the roof of my mouth.
Hold on, what?
Yes, from childhood, I could never reach my soft palate, the soft area on the top of your mouth. Rolling R’s was impossible, which is why I never learned Spanish or Russian. Some words come out strangely: bears becomes beah, roses become roseth.
Coupled with the fact that most Americans think I’m a foreigner, this created a questionable accent. Where are you from was met with consternation:
How can you say you’re from Hawaii when you talk like that?
I actually stopped talking for a few years because I was so ashamed of being different.
The signs were all there: the fact I could not breast feed, eating meat was difficult and could not be chewed, bubble gum hurt my tongue, not jaw. The mobility of my tongue was severely decreased and particular words caused me stress.
“I parked the car at Harvard yard” is the best sentence to describe what it sounds like, but add a higher pitch and a slight slur.
Heck, sometimes when I ran my collarbone would hurt. This was caused by a restriction of the muscles to loosen in my mouth, and I loved running.
The research is recent, it’s such a small problem to have but it affected me so deeply my entire life. I would get nervous talking to people, my voice was always octaves higher than others, the reverberation of words was always shorter because less movement against the tongue. I would think of a word and my tongue would just stop, drop and roll.
And it crippled my self-esteem.
Sometimes, when speaking a foreign language, teachers would get on me for pronunciation. I have videos of me practicing the tongue movements, attempting to get the word right for hours, much akin to “Pygmalion.” It was the most frustrating thing.
But, after a while, I stopped caring.
Only those who were particularly nit picky or simply looking to find a fault would notice the speech impediment. Most everyone had to have it pointed out.
“Mem! I never knew it was speech impediment, I always loved your accent!”
I would blush, excited that my friends were kind enough to hide the truth, or so I would convince myself. If it was a good lie, I loved it.
I started just embracing the fact that I had a short tongue and started just reveling in the joys of being me. I started talking more and owning the problem.
This past summer, I was talking to my Godmother and she had mentioned my speech impediment. As a speech therapist and also a woman who I rarely talked to, she decided to probe:
“Mem, say Ah!”
I opened my mouth and she told me to lift my tongue. I tried and she probed more.
“Mem, touch your tongue to your soft palate.”
I couldn’t.
She was incredulous. As if she had discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb and dropped arrays of questions to both my parents and myself:
- Was she difficult to breast feed?
- Does she not chew her food well?
- How about licking an ice cream cone? (This question is what got my father’s attention, as I never liked ice cream cones and always ate it in cups or bowls and he was confused over the preference)
- What about chewing gum?
After the barrage of questions, she became frustrated. She was my godmother for twenty-five years, a licensed speech pathologist and I was a twenty-five-year-old polyglot who had an ailment that was directly in her alley. She broke down into tears as she felt the guilt that her goddaughter’s inherent shyness throughout her childhood was caused by her lack of concern with the subject that she based her life’s work on.
And when I’m twenty-six I will be seeing a doctor to cut my frenulum. At this point, I’ve accepted the fact that I have survived with something that was so crippling to my childhood and would like to keep it, but a part of me is equally curious to see how drastically my life will change when I can pronounce words correctly.
