the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

Tales from the Other Side of Language 55
the floor firmly. She is surprised. Standing with both feet, still held strongly
in my arms, she takes the first challenging and magical step onto the floor.
Neither mother nor staff can believe it’s happening. Mother walks the IV
pole beside us, and I support the toddler’s walk down the hallway. They
practice in the following days, both delighting in this milestone. A kind of
robust health is taking place between them that helps sturdy them in facing
the illness issues more securely. Early development is a powerful force, a
driver for change, and I use it here.
Infants, at the get-go, love novelty. The developing brain recognizes the
familiar and then chooses the new. A related interest is variety. They are the
way the brain develops. Variety is also how my brain is developing, seeing
art in museums, looking at the world visually—people’s costuming, the way
vegetables are laid out, the light flowing across the violets in my lawn this
morning.
Variety is also sensing something more about the non-verbal here with
these babies, the sense of a baby’s vitality, how much communication there
is in them, the visual, sensory quality of it.
Variety and pleasure in whatever I am doing makes my rush to return
to the verbal world much more tolerable. They make my stay here in the inbetween
world richly engrossing. At Parsons I feel the visual sensations of
the paint moving across the paper, and the feeling comes with me as I watch
each baby and mother struggle across a canvas of life and death. The layers
of grief in my own body find affinities with a mother’s anguish in holding
life for her baby. I can’t clearly articulate any of this yet, but I’m beginning
to sense how my body’s limitations help me see.
I scrub and gown-up to be sterile to go into a reverse isolation unit to be
with a baby boy who was born with no immune system. To keep him alive
he is being protected from the world’s germs and viruses in this sterile little
room. Today he has just had a painful bath. He is crying from the irritation
of the water and the cloth washing his rashy delicate skin. The nurse dries
him off and wraps a warm blanket around him.