Hard to Be a Teen Rebel (Winter 2001)
By Warren Brown
 
I have one enduring memory of childhood. Hardly a day went by when my mother didn't shake her right-hand index finger at me and say, "Don't."
 
I thought I was a well-behaved boy. But my mother didn't seem to think so. She seemed to have an acute sense of right and wrong and was determined that none of her three children would embarrass her in public.
 
She had left full-time paid employment at the age of 24 to become a mother. It was her life's work. She wanted to be a success at it. She didn't want any friends or relations questioning her mothering skills.
 
So it seemed that whenever I wanted to act like a boy and have a bit of fun, she would raise her right hand into the air, lift her index finger and growl: "Don't."
 
I didn't start stuttering until I was 12 1/2. The onset was gradual.
 
My speech deteriorated over a number of weeks. It slowly dawned on me that something wasn't quite right with my body.
 
The crunch came when I had to give a speech to my Form 2 class on a project I had completed on the Middle Ages. No words came out.
 
So I began writing up details of my project on the blackboard. Occasionally I tried to speak. No sounds came out of my mouth.
 
After about 10 minutes, I had written enough words and drawn enough diagrams to explain my project. It seemed pointless to speak at that stage. So I returned to my desk and sat down.
 
My teacher rang my mother that night and suggested speech therapy.
 
For the third term of my Form 2 year, my mother took me out of school one afternoon a week to a speech clinic in Lower Hutt. There I was left to play with some toys on the floor of the speech clinic.
 
When the speech therapist thought I looked relaxed, she would ask me to read from a book or would engage me in casual conversation.
 
That was 1966. The theory in those days was that it was wrong to draw children's attention to their stuttering.
 
Therapists believed that talking to children about their stuttering would make them more aware of their problems and so make it much harder to overcome the condition.
 
The approach was to relax the children, then use subterfuge to impart speech skills without calling the children's attention to their speech.
 
The theory was wrong. Of course I knew I had speech problems. Of course I knew why my mother was taking me out of school one afternoon a week. Even my classmates knew why I was taking time off school.
 
But I was a good little boy and always tried to do what adults told me to do. I didn't want to disappoint the nice speech therapist so I tried my best at the clinic.
 
By the end of the third term, my speech sounded much better to my therapist, my teacher and my mother. My parents even bought me a copy of a Beatles 45, Yellow Submarine, as a reward for my improvement. But after playing it repeatedly, I preferred the flip side, Eleanor Rigby, with Paul McCartney singing: "Ahhh, look at all the lonely people..."
 
Over the Christmas holidays, my fluency deteriorated slightly. It was no big deal. Extra therapy sessions weren't possible because the speech clinic was closed for the holidays.
 
But whenever my mother heard me stuttering, she raised her right hand, wagged her index finger at me and growled, "Don't."
 
Ironically, this approach to therapy was exactly the opposite of what the speech therapist had tried.
 
But my mother's attempts at stopping my stuttering didn't work either. I couldn't stop stuttering.
 
So I reduced the amount of speaking I did, especially when my mother was around. She couldn't wag her finger at me if she didn't hear me speaking.
 
When I was 14, my mother began complaining that I was sullen and uncommunicative. This was hardly surprising. If I talked, I stuttered. Then I got told off.
 
So I didn't talk. I resented not being able to talk. I became sullen.
 
In fact, it was my mother's attitude towards my speech that was making me sullen and uncommunicative.
 
I could handle the low-stress situations at home all right, like asking someone to pass the butter at the breakfast table.
 
But the teenage years are a transition from being dependent on your parents to being =independent of your parents. Naturally I wanted a bit of independence, like my friends at school. But to get any independence involved negotiating with my parents for that independence.
 
That involved a high-stress situation-arguing with them to get across my point of view.
 
But whenever I tried to argue with my mother, I stuttered. She raised her right hand, lifted her index finger and said, "Don't."
 
It was pointless arguing with my father because he always took my mother's side. I felt trapped in childhood.
 
But life wasn't too bad. I loved secondary school and had no trouble making friends among my classmates. I don't have any recollection of the bullying that so many child stutterers endure, often in silence.
 
The nearest I came to speech therapy at secondary school was audio-lingual French.In the third and fourth forms, our French teacher played records in class. We had to imitate the pronunciation we heard on the records. For homework, we all had a set of 45 records that we had to play and speak along with them. This seemed to help my fluency.
 
In my later years at secondary school, speaking in class was a bit of a problem. I didn't enjoy it. I knew that it was socially unacceptable to stutter in that situation. But I spoke when I had to.
 
None of my secondary-school teachers referred me to a speech therapist, so my dysfluencies can't have been too bad.
 
By the sixth form, my home life was increasingly frustrating. My parents wanted me to be a nice little boy who talked to them. But I couldn't talk to them for any length of time without stuttering and my mother always stopped me from speaking when she heard me stuttering.
 
It was easier for me to retreat to my bedroom and do my homework. My parents were surprised that I always seemed to have far more homework than my brother and sister. But often I spent the time gazing out the window at Wellington Harbour or reading a library book, to fill in the time.
 
That was when I hatched a plan to leave home. My mother had decided, when I was five years old, that I would go to university. I had no choice in the matter.
 
Because I was good at math, it looked like I was heading towards a science degree at Wellington's Victoria University. But I decided I wanted to do an engineering degree at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch.
 
It was a crazy plan. I had no interest in constructing bridges or buildings and I had absolutely no aptitude for civil engineering. But I had a naïve belief that things would work out right.
 
After completing a miserable intermediate year of maths, physics and chemistry at Victoria University, I was accepted into the School of Engineering at the University of Canterbury.
 
At age 19 1/2, I flew alone to Christchurch on a Boeing 737 then took a taxi to a university residence hall. Within a matter of hours, my life totally changed as I began to meet the other students I would be sharing my life with.
 
Academically, my first year in Christchurch was largely a disaster. But I don't regret it. I was too busy taking a crash course in mild teenage rebellion-doing what I wanted, feeling what I wanted and saying what I wanted. It was an awesome year.
 
Eight years of growing up were compressed into nine months.
 
Suddenly stuttering wasn't a problem. I was surrounded with dozens of great new friends, living so close together that I was talking with them all the time.
 
My lack of fluency didn't bother me. In fact, I was having such a great time that I hardly noticed my dysfluencies. The crazy plan worked.
 
Later the intense boredom of engineering lectures and the banal boorishness of some engineering students drove me to enroll in an extra paper-in sociology. This paper was so interesting that a year later I switched faculties. This led to an arts degree, majoring in sociology.
 
After a year in menial jobs, I studied journalism at Wellington Polytechnic. It wasn't until I was working as a journalist that I figured it was time to do something about improving my fluency. I approached the speech clinic at Christchurch Public Hospital in 1981. Bridget Larkins gave me 12 one-hour sessions in smooth speech, spread over about five weeks.
 
The technique worked. Regular practice helped maintain my fluency skills.
 
Then in 1986, I was introduced to Speak Easy. It gave me the motivation to push forward with my life.
 
It seems I've spent much of my life battling against the wagging finger and the "don'ts."
 
It's bad enough being told what not to do. It is even worse when we internalize the "don'ts" and start to feel guilty for not doing what we want to do and not saying what we want to say.
 
My stuttering began just as I was about to enter my teenage years. It crushed my spirit. At a time when I was starting to think about sex and looking for new exciting relationships with people, I was trapped into doing what my mother wanted me to do.
 
Nowadays I fight back.
 
 

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