Rarely do I pay attention to the news and never do I read the newspaper but today when I went for my morning coffee there was someone in my normal table so I sat at the one next to it. Now usually this table is where the owner sits and reads his paper before the morning rush so naturally todays paper was sitting there. After the majority of my Nicaraguan, a few pages of my book, and my first business call of the day I looked at the headlines of the paper and saw this article.
Now I say I couldn’t finish it because I was on the verge of tears reading it. Being in a public place, I just assume not do that there so I folded the paper back up, paid for my coffee, and hurried to the office to write this.
The article is about “The King’s Speech” and how it brings awareness to stuttering and the positive effects it is having on children who stutter. Now, I saw the movie. I thought it was great but it didn’t strike a chord with me until I read the words of the elven year old boy in this article. There was something familiar about this boys thoughts, feelings, and experiences. They were mine, twenty something years ago.
I was a stutterer. Actually, I AM a stutterer but it is manageable now, has been for years. I have been able to manage my stuttering for so long that I forgot how painful it was when I couldn’t manage it. That’s why “The Kings Speech” didn’t effect me. The movie is about an adult who struggles with stuttering. I was never that but I was a boy who struggled and that’s why this article hit home so much.
I was reminded of how hard it was to be a stuttering child. I was made fun of constantly. How does a child deal with being made fun of something they have no control over? I forgot how I did it. Some words just didn’t come out. It was frustrating and once I got frustrated I would try to force the word out and that would make things even worse. Imagine wanting to say a word like Mexico and getting stuck on the letter M. Can you picture what this looks like to a person who doesn’t know that, this kid is just stuttering. I went to many different speech therapists in the afternoons after school. One even tried to hypnotize me. I got pulled out of class once a week for a “special” class, which I think was a fucking ESL class. How that helped my stuttering I have no idea. My stuttering was a big concern within my family and it seemed that everyone knew that “Davey” stuttered. I remember my big cousin who was only a few years older than me telling me patiently to, “Calm down” and to, “Start over.” This whole part of my childhood sucked. In writing this I now know why I suppressed these memories so far down deep that even a movie about a stutterer didn’t remind me of them.
My version of “The King’s Speech” happened in sixth grade. The entire graduating class of 156th Street Elementary School was asked to write a graduation speech. This stuttering “D” student was one of the few to be selected to say their speech in front of the graduating class and all who attended the graduation ceremony. I executed it flawlessly. It wasn’t the end of my stuttering but it was pivotal point in my life where stuttering started to become less of an issue.
