Incompetent

I took Bub to a speech-therapy evaluation yesterday. This was a follow-up to the four months of weekly therapy he received at the beginning of the year; the idea is to test him to see how he’s progressed and whether he qualifies for continued therapy this summer.

Luckily, Bub was in an enchanting mood. I explained that we were going to the building where we used to see Becky, but that today we would see Kim instead. After only a few token protests ("No Kim! How about Becky?"), he settled into the spirit of the adventure.

Kim had brought a Thomas the Tank Engine lift-the-flap book to entertain Bub between the rounds of testing. This was both a stroke of genius on her part and a sign of her profound misunderstanding of Bub’s nature (pardonable, since she had never met him before). Bub relaxed immediately and began chatting, correctly surmising that Percy was surprised – based on the round O-shape of his mouth – though unable to explain why until prompted by my observation that the train had crashed. Kim’s plan was to take this book away from Bub periodically in order to lead him through some exercises on picture-identification and listening skills.

(Pause here to imagine my maniacal laughter.)

Bub coped with this agenda far better than I would have predicted: when Kim explained that he could have the Thomas book back as soon as we finished her book, he flipped through the pages rapidly, identifying each pictured object without hesitation. The only real quirk here was that in addition to identifying the pictures, he also included the page numbers (found in the bottom corner in small print). "One apple! Two birds! Three trees! Four cats!" he exclaimed, until Kim helpfully covered the numbers with her hand. Bub hesitated only over pictures that were unfamiliar to him – a mermaid, a passenger train (that really didn’t look like a train at all) – turning to me to say, "I don’t know what that is, Mama!" When the page included several animals or items of clothing, he had no difficulty moving from object-labeling to category-labeling.

Not surprisingly, Bub achieved a score within normal range on this part of the test. His noun-vocabulary has always been good – he’s never had any difficulty with labeling things. The next test was harder: it involved listening to Kim’s instructions and following them. "Can you point to the dog?" she asked, showing him a page with four animals on it.

"No," said Bub, adding, "How about point to the cat?" (A training course hubby and I took on language development instructed us always to follow the child’s lead, using as a somewhat clumsy mnemonic this mantra: "Children who lead get the words they need; a child who is led gets somebody else’s agenda instead." Bub, I feel, has taken those words perhaps too much to heart. He’s never been a fan of getting somebody else’s agenda instead.)

Despite this inauspicious beginning, after one of two tries Bub settled down to the task, following both one-step and two-step instructions successfully. About four or five pages into the booklet, he came to a picture of a tree with one bird sitting on the branches and three birds fluttering around it. "Bub, can you point to the bird who is not flying?" Kim prompted.

Doubt fell across his face like a curtain. He hesitated, lifted a finger, hesitated again. Finally, he pointed to one of the flying birds and said, "That one is flying."

"Yes it is!" Kim said encouragingly. "Now can you point to a bird who is NOT flying?"

Bub’s eyes flickered back and forth from the page to Kim’s face, his uncertainty palpable. Finally Kim relented and showed him: "This bird is flying, and this bird is flying, but this bird is not flying!"

The next page featured four zoo animals in their pens. "Can you point to the elephant first, and then…" Kim began. Bub eagerly pointed to the elephant and Kim gently moved his hand away. "Listen," she said kindly, "First point to the elephant and then to the giraffe!"

There was a slight pause – and then the tears cascaded down Bub’s cheeks like bubbles from a lava lamp. It was as if he was converting from a solid to a liquid state, in a sudden outpouring of pure sadness. He wailed for a minute or two before accepting a hug and demanding a kleenex, overcome with a sense of his own incompetence. He was not angry or frustrated, just stricken by the sudden reversal of fortunes – his joyful recognition of the elephant, his belief that despite his lapse with the flying-and-not-flying birds he could at least get this one right – all of it served to intensify the crash into failure.

I’ve seen it in him before, this sheer despair at doing something the wrong way, at not getting the right answer. Even as a toddler he could be reduced to tears by a single instruction of "No!" – especially when he thought he was doing something right: opening the garbage can, starting the dishwasher. It took awhile before he learned the difference between failure and mere misbehaviour – his tears arose from a sense of incompetence, not from the belief that he had displeased me.

Simple ignorance he can handle – when he didn’t recognize the mermaid in the first exercise, he had no difficulty asking me what it was. He does not (yet) expect himself to know everything. But when he thinks he knows something – when he has already begun that internal celebration of his own competence, of his own sure-footed knowledge – the discovery that he is mistaken can be devastating.

Within minutes Bub was sunshiny again, the brief storm passing as quickly as it had started. But I left the session feeling as if he had punched a little hole in my heart. How do I show him that it’s okay to make mistakes, that he is still smart and strong and lovable even when he gets the answer wrong? And I wonder – is this even a lesson I’ve learned myself, so that I can impart it to him, a little boy who is all too easily made ashamed by his flawed, human self?