Voices: After 9 years, my daughter finds her voice

“Lauren talks too much,” said the note from my teacher on my second-grade report card. And third grade. And fourth.

I couldn’t help it, really. It was in my genes. My parents, after all, had met decades earlier in the high school principal’s office after both getting in trouble for — you guessed it — talking too much.

My daughter, Rachel, 9, started fourth grade this week, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that she’ll talk too much. Way, way too much. Sorry, teachers, but she’s worked too hard not to.

For her entire life, Rachel has battled a significant speech delay. I first noticed it when she was almost 2 years old. A bright, cheerful toddler, she had quickly learned colors, shapes and numbers. But she never seemed to string words together. On the playground, Rachel would ask to play with a “ball,” but other kids her age wanted a “red ball.” By the time her vocabulary caught up to “red ball,” the other kids were asking for a “big red ball.” The gap never seemed to close.

Not knowing where to start, I called a county social worker who observed Rachel for an afternoon. She’s a little behind, the nice woman said, but she’ll grow out of it. I was relieved.

By age 3, she still wasn’t stringing together sentences and almost never asked questions. The typical “Why? Why?” of a 3-year-old wasn’t happening at my house. When she did ask questions, the words were out of order. You could see her frustration when Mommy didn’t understand what she was trying to say. Thinking it would help, I enrolled her in preschool. But her frustration grew worse in a noisy room full of children, and she went in and out of three preschools in one year. I tried several playgroups, with the same results. Our whole family felt frazzled.

At age 3½, a test showed she had the language skills of a 2-year-old. She obviously wasn’t “growing out of it.” We needed help.

She soon began speech therapy at our local children’s hospital. Rachel’s therapists were amazing, teaching her, among other things, the nuanced art of conversation. Think for a moment how complex that is: the back-and-forth, knowing when it’s your turn to jump in, staying on topic, knowing when to change the topic, knowing when the conversation is done. Rachel often got frustrated but never gave up, plugging away week after week.

Weeks turned into years, and she showed incredible improvement, learning to ask questions and to speak up for herself. At age 6, she got in trouble at school when she yelled, "You’re going as slow as a snail!” at her first-grade teacher. I secretly cheered that she was “using her words,” even if technically they were the wrong ones. Despite all this, her scores on speech tests continually fell shy of the range for a “typical” child her age. It felt like she’d never catch up.

Until now. After six years of hard work, her scores recently fell smack in the middle of the “typical” range. I had to blink twice when I saw them. Just like that, she was done.

I can’t overstate what a huge achievement this is. Closing that persistent gap has changed the trajectory of Rachel’s life and our entire family's. She can now express her thoughts, feelings and questions like never before. She can hold her own in conversations and, like a wonderfully typical kid, sometimes gets sassy. But mostly, she leaves me grinning from ear to ear at moments like this:

“I love you, Rachel. You’re my sweet, sweet girl.”

“I love you, too, Mommy. You’re my sweet, sweet adult.”

She’s come so far, and it wasn’t easy. So go ahead, Rachel — gab it up at school. You’ve earned it.

Olsen is a copy editor at Paste BN.