Speech and the Postmaster

Hello, I’m doing something a bit different this month. This is the first chapter of my new book, “Meet Me Where I Am: Navigating the Intersection of Autism and OCD.”?It’s a non-fiction memoir of twelve years of collaboration with an extremely demand-avoidant, anxious, autistic boy with OCD. The book includes stories of our adventures and his adult opinions and insights. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=elizabeth+ives+field&crid=1R4T2MSL9Q5OJ&sprefix=%2Caps%2C78&ref=nb_sb_ss_recent_1_0_recent

This is how it all began.

Chapter 1???Speech and the Postmaster

Peering up at me from behind round glasses framed by shoulder-length brown hair, Samuel announced, “The postmaster stole my words and hid them in the dead letter office.”

“Ahhh,” I replied, trying to decide what to say next.

Ten-year-old Samuel had a diagnosis on the autism spectrum and his school team had asked me to make recommendations about his highly unusual but very consistent speech patterns. After years of home schooling, Sam began attending public school in fourth grade. Since then, he had been increasingly reinventing common words in ways unique to him.?Once he changed them, the words stayed changed. He never accidentally said them correctly.

As a result, he was becoming less and less intelligible and his mother, Beverly, often had to interpret for him.?Among his unique speech substitutions were:

es for yes

yee for you

woo-erd for word

haggy for hungry

mead for me

one-four for fourteen and a substitution of p for f in most other words

And Sam had eliminated the words What, Who, Where, and Why. ?If he needed one of these, he simply replaced it with When.

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Although Samuel used these and other changes consistently in his own speech, he did say the conventional words when speaking through his stuffed toys, a sock monkey named Bim, and the cartoon tiger Hobbs, created by his very artistic mother. After protesting to Beverly, “When (why) are yee making mead do this?”, Sam demonstrated that he could indeed say yes, hungry, and other words from the list if he was speaking as Bim or Hobbs. Apparently, the postmaster had taken the correct versions of the words only from Sam, not from Bim and Hobbs.

Beverly explained, “We understand him at home. I think he talks that way so I will have to be there to translate for him.” That sounded right to me.

Also, a whole category of words had gone missing.?Samuel proclaimed that his polite words and greetings were in separate packages deep in the back of the dead letter office. Apparently, when he was six years old, the adults at Samuel’s private school had insisted that he should, “say the magic words,” so these words had run away and later been captured by the postmaster.??Now, four years later, he still could not utter please, thank you, hello, good-bye or similar polite or greeting words, ever.?

Since my mission was to recommend ways to improve this situation, I thought it prudent to ask what had already been tried.?Samuel’s speech/language pathologist had described her attempts at prompting, discussion, role playing, using social stories, and studying how polite words were used in different cultures. His parents had given him a basket of small papers with words like please, thank you and excuse me which he could, but rarely did, hand to people instead of saying the polite words. And, as suggested by his parents, Sam would, on rare occasions, use alternatives like “I appreciate that you …” because he could not say, “Thank you.” Unfortunately, neither these paper words nor the alternative phrases were accepted substitutes for polite words at school.

Because Sam was again learning at home, we met there. He and his mother guided me on a thorough and detailed excursion through their home and yard.?The school team had described Sam as generally uncommunicative except to get his needs met, but he participated eagerly in this tour, verbally and physically taking the lead whenever possible. Unlike her son, Beverly is reliably talkative, and she had become accustomed to explaining Samuel to others, so he sometimes needed to interrupt. He did so persistently.

As we walked, I learned, through Sam’s somewhat fragmented and disjointed expository speech and his mother’s clarifications, that Sam’s trusted paraprofessional had left the school, the school was repeatedly calling Beverly to take him home because of some disruptive behavior or other, and he was complaining of frequent stomach upsets and headaches. So, his parents chose to resume homeschooling and work toward some resolution for the next year.

We ended our tour with a visit to a wonderful miniature village Samuel and Beverly had created in his bedroom. The town was known as Stesselville and included a seven-story school, complete with behavioral rules which Sam had read in his mother’s psychology texts and posted on the walls of the miniature building. The Stesselville postmaster’s dead letter office, containing the missing words, was in Sam’s closet.

So here we were, back at the discussion of the postmaster’s word theft.?My best response at that juncture seemed to be “Why?”

“Because he is grouchy,” Samuel replied.

“Do you think we could get him to give them back?” I asked. “You deserve to have your words”.

“Maybe, if he was in a good mood.”

This led to some pondering of how we might improve this invisible postmaster’s mood. Perhaps we could give him something??We settled on the idea of trading the damaged words for their conventional counterparts, so Samuel made the first of several trips upstairs to check on the postmaster’s mood. Not good at the moment.

Next, we decided on the order in which he would request the return of his words, grouping them into packages according to the first letter in the words. After consulting a dictionary and finding that there were only three problem words beginning with “Y,” we had our first target.?He made it clear that the polite words would not be recoverable this way, as they were buried too deep in the dead letter office. I did not argue. Another check of the closet determined that the postmaster was still grumpy.

We decided Sam could package the Y words to trade later when the postmaster’s mood improved. Samuel had stopped writing anything by hand, evidently in resistance to a determined occupational therapist who had insistently corrected his formation of letters, so he thumped off to the computer to make package labels for the defective words. His thumping gait was the result of Sam refusing for several years to allow his left heel to touch the floor. But that’s another story.

As I was getting into my car to leave, and still talking with Beverly, Sam stuck his head out the door and asked how he should indicate the defective words.

“How about an asterisk?”

“Okay!” and he scurried off.

Driving home, having thoroughly enjoyed the visit, I wondered if anything would come of it.

A few days later, my phone rang.?I had been told that Sam hated to talk on the phone, so I was surprised to hear his voice saying, “Is it you?”?(not yee). When I had proven my identity to his satisfaction, he declared, “I got three woo-erds back; yes, you and yesterday. I want to get W back next.”

The next week Beverly called to say that Sam had been ill for several days but had never wavered from using the recovered Y words correctly.

A couple weeks passed, and he reported, “I got back my W words”. They were no longer woo-erds. A major gain from that package was the recovery of all the Wh-question words. Sam now didn’t need to substitute when for why, what, who and where, making his questions much easier to understand. He said T words would be next, but reminded me, without actually saying the absent expression of gratitude, that thank you would not be in that package “because polite words are packaged separately in the dead letter office; locked up, and the key is lost”.

Two months after my consultation at his home, I found a phone message from Sam saying I should call him. Beverly answered and I could hear Sam running to the phone saying, “Don’t tell her!”?He had now recovered his T and F words which he demonstrated by saying “four, five, fourteen”, and “I want my father to fix it. Next, I’ll get my J words.”

This process went on over the course of nine months while his mother, father and I did nothing but admire his progress.?We had a celebratory lobster casserole dinner at his home when he had thirteen packages of words recovered and another when, just a week later, he had all twenty-six. I gave him a trophy with his name and accomplishment inscribed.

Rarely did Sam misuse one of the recovered words, and his speech was now error-free and easy to understand. He did provide himself with some insurance by saying that if he relapsed the error would go back to the postmaster, leaving him with the correct version. His father, Stes, confirmed later that Sam willingly repaired his occasional misuse of a recovered word if they simply reminded him that he could now say that word correctly.

And the polite words? They were still under lock and key in the dead letter office.

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