Joe learned early on that if you can't combine sounds very easily it's wise to have a big repertoire of individual sounds to get your point across. We joked that he sounded like a little Xhosa speaker with his tongue clicks. He used two different kinds of raspberries and a combination of lip smackings to communicate with us. If you smack your lips three times in my house, I'll expect you to mean sandals, keys, or penis because that's the Joe lexicon.
All of those sounds I could label and classify. One of his favorites had me stumped, though: a fricative I couldn't duplicate and couldn't even find a name for in the International Phonetic Alphabet (yeah, language geek that I am, I looked). Fricatives are the hissing sounds in a language. We have nine of them in English* but lots more exist -- the soft b used in Spanish, the two ch sounds in German (one in "ich" and a slightly more posterior one in "buch"), the French r sound (which, if memory serves, is a uvular fricative. Isn't it nice to know you can talk with your uvula?). Children with cleft palates sometimes rely on pharyngeal fricatives (sort of a deep gargly sound) because they can't muster enough intra-oral pressure to make sounds like /s/.
In all this panoply of fricatives, though, there's nothing like Joe's sound. He seemed to take the whole back half of his vocal tract, squeeze it tight and let 'er rip. It sounded like a combination of a jacked-up guard cat and an angry pressure cooker on the edge of geyserhood. He used it to mean anything related to "spray" or "squirt": Windex, shower, catsup, hose. Last night, though, we passed a sprinkler on the way home and he said "Spray!" (rendered "bay" but close enough for me). I was curious. I asked him, "How does it go?"
He couldn't make his sound. He tried and came out with a half-hearted Spanish x.
The thing I wasn't prepared for about childhood seen from the other side was its evanescence. Everything changes so quickly. I knew the schlocky songs ("Sunrise, Sunset," "Turn Around") but nothing could prepare me for the reality: in roughly the time it takes to floss, my firstborn has grown from a pink inscrutable infant into a person with permanent teeth, favorite kinds of sushi, and a voracious appetite for science fiction. Today he lifted me up off the ground. (And then he promptly fell over. But he did it.) I mean, whoa (she says articulately). How did that happen?
From my children's mutability arises my parenting mantra, This Too Shall Pass, and its corollary, Enjoy It While It Lasts. The things that annoy me, the things over which I've wrung my hands and gnashed my teeth -- they've faded away like those first teething pains. (When Alex was cutting his first tooth, I was sure something was seriously wrong with him. Cancer. Undiagnosed genetic disease. Something Really Bad. I was so embarrassed when his tooth popped.) Conversely, the things I've loved and reveled in, like Marty saying "No like it very all" to express displeasure as a not-quite 2yo, or Alex's trilling "happy noise" from the same age -- those are gone too.
There is a prayer I often pray: Oh, God, make of my life a lovely thing. Sometimes it's on bad days, when "non-hideous thing" seems like a more manageable goal. But tonight I am thinking hopefully, envisioning the ephemera of my children's lives as jewels on a delicate chain. The reality fades, but I hold the memories like something precious, something sparkling and beautiful and many-faceted.
Goodbye, Mystery Fricative. It was nice knowing you.
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*f, v, th, TH, s, z, sh, zh, and h
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