If someone had said to me that one day, you’ll face a long and difficult road to conceive, then when you DO have that blessed child, you will struggle to understand and connect with him to the point of utter heartbreak, would I not have shut them down in disbelief?
Yet this is the exact journey my firstborn son and I set sail on together, in a dizzying eddy of excitement and anticipation followed by pounding waves of turmoil and frustration. But in a truly wonderful way, it gave me the purpose I feel blessed to hold in my hand today.
Our struggles to connect from birth to kinder were forever questioned like the age old question of "the chicken or the egg?".
Was it my fragile mental health?
Was it that he found this world so uncomfortable and confusing that no soothing touch could appease his cries?
Nor lingering gaze could comfort him?
Was it because there were few exchanges of smile-inducing-baby-babble from his mouth?
Or the invisible, million miles between us?
As I reflect, I can see it was ALL of this, in no particular order.
My sorrow in not being able to nurture preceded his seeming lack of want for me, and visa versa. I felt I was failing as his mother, and he was lost in trying to communicate to a world of adults that were incapable of interpreting him.
As he grew into a tumbling, busy toddler, I became obsessed with being one step ahead, haplessly circumnavigating meltdowns of misunderstanding. His frustration at me not being able to read his needs bore constant tension, to which by days end, I could hardly bare to withstand.
My mother-heart yearned to connect with this beautiful boy that I had waited years to hold, yet although there was the deepest love, our ability to comprehend each other was fractured.
There was one, beautiful thing though, that we both found harmony and connection in, and it came in the form of illustrated storybooks and art. He gravitated to pictures like moth to flame, the same way I have always found solace in colours, form and creation.
Each night, when we curled up together with his favourite books, it was a time that I truly felt our souls connect. As our eyes journeyed through swirls of colour and fantastical scenes of wonder, he would light up, attempt to speak to me, and giggle at my animated voice. At stories end, his soft, warm body would nestle in to mine. It was the deepest feeling of bliss.
I held onto every, precious moment at the end of those long days. They filled my depleted heart back up with hope, and gave me the courage to do it all again tomorrow.
Then kinder began.
His then still, limited ability to verbally converse, along with out impotence to understand one another became more fraught than ever.
His incredibly bright little brain had ALL the words, and knew ALL the ‘things’, but he simply could not express what he needed, nor comprehend what was being ASKED of him. Those years were marred with the deepest frustration in performing the most meagre, yet necessary, everyday tasks.
Then came the increasingly regular phone calls and ‘incident reports’ that I would be gingerly handed to me as I arrived to collect him. Something had to change, and through the grace of God, and the angels he put in our paths to guide us - it came in the form of early intervention.
We were led to the door of some amazing practitioners, two of which will forever stick in my mind; a beautiful, warm Speech Therapist and OT who immediately ‘got’ him. They not only changed his little life, but ours too.
They discovered that what this beautiful boy needed most, was a vessel to communicate, and it wasn’t though words - it was through PICTURES.
Embracing their guidance, a velcro strip was attached to a wall in our home and became filled with mini pictures of toilets, clothes, dinner plates full of food, glasses of water, cars, toothbrushes and other various everyday ‘tasks’. We even got creative in drawing our own, like poos, wees, cats, dogs and other every day happenings … he even drew one himself which he called ‘ponkany’ (we still don’t know what it is, but it brought so many giggles, that we still use it to this day. I often add it to our shopping list).
With pictures, our days went from unbridled frustration, to communicating in a dialect we BOTH clearly understood, AND, direction he would act upon!! Images of toilet, a dinner plate, a tooth brush, clothes, a car and kinder kids started our days, then pictures of dinner plates, baths and books narrated our evenings.
This is how we communicated every day.
Minimising my spoken words and directives changed our lives. He stopped reacting as though I was talking to him in a foreign tongue, and I finally stopped calling myself out as a failure. A heart connection began to form, as we started truly understanding each other.
With this new flow in our lives, we begun to incorporate more complex visual social stories, and implemented faces of emotions and zones of regulation to help him understand his behaviour. He interpreted them so brilliantly, that it was without doubt we knew this was going to be an integral part of the way we communicated as a family.
A decade on from the beginning of this story, with persistence and love, my son now speaks fluently. Yet still, we draw back to pictures when there are no words, and the impact this additional means to communicate is immeasurable. Even his little sister has found her voice in this way, using imagery and drawings to tell me how she’s feeling.
My son, with whom I now share the most exquisite, heart-connected bond is the sole reason I do what I do today; educating the world about visual communication and emotional literacy.
He has PROVEN that images can be more powerful than spoken words, and that the ways in which we can communicate with each other are in fact, LIMITLESS.
With love,
Susanna xx
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