Therapy Mom
It’s like a Momager, but for therapy. To this day, I am uncertain if I feel that being a speech therapist has been a blessing or a curse on this journey. It is important to explain here that I have carefully crafted a near 20-year career without ever giving therapy to a child. This has been a conscious and deliberate decision, making it all the more ironic (and a source of endless amusement among my therapist friends) that I suddenly found myself thrust into the deep (and very personal) end of paediatric speech therapy. From the moment that N was diagnosed, I made it my business to learn all I could about developmental apraxia of speech, oral motor therapy, Talk Tools, bubble bears, and every whistle and straw known to man. Side bar – think carefully before you Google ‘sucking and blowing’.
N’s speech therapy began about 2 weeks before his 2nd birthday (mid-March 2018). Twice a week for 20-30 minutes. Due to his age, I had to participate in (and mediate) the sessions. I do not know how to put into words how painful and difficult I found this. If he had a good session, I became blindly optimistic, only for that feeling to be shattered a few days later at the next session. If he had a bad session, I felt personally responsible because not only was I his mother, but I was also a trained therapist and I still couldn’t get him to cooperate or participate. The b*&ch about apraxia is the inconsistency. One day he could make a sound, and then we would never hear it again. N could say “aaahhh”; could pretend he was a fish and go “puh puh” with pursed lips. When asked to put the two sounds together to say “up”, he looked at us as if we were asking him to build a rocket and fly to the moon. Because of this, and because I think that N’s apraxia is/was seemingly severe, progress was imperceptible to anyone outside of the therapy room (and often to us inside the room too). His therapist kept reiterating that, even though we couldn’t see measurable change, each session was contributing to some sort of gain…building a foundation. She has at least 30 years of experience and I had to trust her. Nevertheless, I felt that nobody understood what we were doing; what we were going through; how hard we were working. It was soul destroying.
Because the speech therapy wasn’t enough fun on its own, we also did Occupational Therapy once a week for a full hour (after one of the speech therapy sessions). This meant that for one morning a week, N could not go to school and I could not work. I would wake up every Wednesday with a deep pit in my stomach and a feeling of dread, knowing we had to get through an entire morning of therapy. OT was no easier than ST. I sat in a corner of the gym, trying to make myself invisible while willing N to just toe the line and do whatever he was asked. It was so hard for him. He would cry and come to me for comfort and I would gently push him to return to the task at hand, even though I just wanted to pick him up and make a run for it.
The hardest part of the therapies was how totally disempowered I felt. I think there were many reasons for this: not being familiar with approaches to paediatric therapy, not wanting to think like a therapist but just wanting to be N’s mom, being terrified to miss anything (like I had missed his speech problem), being even more terrified of doing the wrong thing and putting him on more of a back foot than he already was. However, I made one massive mistake in my approach to the therapies – a mistake I bitterly regret and will never repeat. I was so aware of being labelled as the ‘therapist mom’ who asked too many questions and interfered too much, that I did the complete opposite. I sat too silently, was acquiescent even when my gut was screaming at me that certain elements were not a good fit for N and that he would never get the full benefit of the therapies if he was so unhappy. When he began his therapies at his new school with the in-house therapists (January 2019), that fraught child of the year before was unrecognisable. Later that year, I attended a talk through my own professional body by an Occupational Therapist who is mom to a child with a rare disease. She spoke about advocating for her son and fighting for what he needed at all costs (even being removed from a hospital ward by security). I sat and listened to her with tears streaming down my face, vowing to never again take a back seat in my son’s treatment. He is MY son.
Going back to the toss up between it being a blessing and a curse that I am a speech therapist (the irony is not lost on anyone). About halfway through the first year of therapies, the OT quite casually recommended we see a developmental paediatrician “just in case” to “rule things out”. Rule out what, I asked her. She couldn’t answer me. As a therapist and as a mother, that kind of vague and flippant recommendation just doesn’t cut it. I am happy to consult whoever you suggest, provided that you can give me a valid reason for the referral before I put myself, my husband and my little boy through an unnecessarily stressful and anxiety provoking (not to mention expensive!) assessment. As the year went on, I got smarter. It was suggested by this same therapist that we give Noah fish oil/Omega 3 supplements. I dutifully went and bought a bottle, which I opened to discover translucent capsules of a yellowish oil. These were meant to be ‘chewable’. The thought of chewing one of these revolting looking capsules relegated the bottle to the back of the cupboard (if I couldn’t, then I knew N wouldn’t). A few months later she commented that he was doing so much better and asked if I had been giving him the Omegas, to which I responded “yes, I have”. With delight she exclaimed how well they seemed to be working. Therapy can be a very subjective game filled with personal bias. If you cannot put your bias to one side to provide my child with the informed and personalised programme he requires and deserves, then you can step aside. On a somewhat related note, I will never again tell a patient or their family how “interesting” their case is. I am sure this is something I used to say a lot without much thought. That is, until I kept hearing it about N. I know his case is interesting in that his apraxia seemed to be so isolated, so ‘ringfenced’. However, I became so frustrated at hearing this when it didn’t make it any easier to treat and it didn’t present us with any solutions that matched the apparent academic fascination with his case. So, is it a blessing or a curse to be on the inside and the outside of my profession at the same time? I will let you know when I make up my mind.