Speech Therapy

I drove across the state last week to visit friends and family in Wilmington, North Carolina. Nick and I owned a house in the quaint little beach town for nine years, purchased during his one season of American Gothic in 1995. I hated Los Angeles back then and felt so strongly that Chloe grow up in a “normal” environment, close to family, that I jumped at the chance to live in North Carolina. So Chloe ended up spending about half of her childhood in NC and half in LA. Until Chloe started tenth grade at Harvard Westlake, we were truly bi-coastal, spending a year or two in Burbank, then hightailing it back to North Carolina. I regret putting Chloe through all that upheaval, even though she adjusted like a champ each time. But I don’t suppose I could change those choices without changing the chance of meeting Omar in Wilmington.

Driving around town for three days brought back so many memories. When I arrived last Thursday, I parked all my stuff at my friend Bonnie’s house and spent most of my time driving from place to place to meet friends for meals. Breakfast with my friend, Carol, on one side of town, lunch with my dance friend, Anne, on the other, back to Bonnie’s for dinner. Donna’s Yoga class followed by lunch downtown. I tooled around in my rental car, taking my time, noticing the ways in which the town had changed and the ways in which it was the same. I pointed out sites to myself as I drove around, thinking, “Oh, there’s where Chloe got her braces put on,” and “I can’t believe that huge Mayfaire shopping center was a horse pasture when we first moved here,” and “That’s the church were Omar got kicked out of preschool for hitting and biting.” 

Heading downtown on Wrightsville Avenue to pick up Omar’s younger brother, Dominique on my last day in town, I drove slowly, noticing the beautiful architecture of St. Andrew’s on the Sound, the wood-sided homes on stilts whose values had no doubt skyrocketed being so near the beach. Crossing over Bradley Creek, I passed the riding stables where we used to drop off the neighbor we carpooled with when Chloe was in middle school, the Tidal Market, the compact Cape Fear Hospital, marvelling at how this area had not changed a bit in twenty five years. A few residential homes converted to businesses flanked either side of the shaded, curvy road. Then I jumped a little and pointed when I saw the brick building on my right where I was forced to bring Omar for speech lessons. I looked across the street to see if the coffee shop was still there, but the whole group of buildings was abandoned, waiting for someone to rescue them from the effects of the Covid shut-down.

I was immediately transported back in my mind to a time before the state would agree to release Omar for adoption. A time when the state of North Carolina was responsible for Omar’s well-being. A time when I was Omar’s Foster Parent, a time so painful and scary and maddening that I wasn’t sure I would survive it. 

We imagined, when we first decided to adopt through the foster care system, that the state of North Carolina would be so glad to see us coming. After all, we were well-educated, financially stable, God-fearing folk. We thought we were doing good in the world. “Let’s get one child out of the system!” we thought. It’s almost laughable, how naive we were. We didn’t know we might easily have come out of the whole process with no child and a big education on the welfare state.

Omar had been in foster care since he was weeks old and had lived with his previous foster family for a year. He was fifteen months old when he came to live with us and we couldn’t get him adopted until he was four years old. It’s very difficult to write about one little aspect of fostering Omar without getting into the whole drama, but I had forgotten about some of the of the stupid and senseless things we were forced to go through when the state of North Carolina was in charge of Omar’s health and well-being.

Two weeks after Omar came to live with us, we were scheduled to take a family trip to Hawaii with our dear friends from California. We’d been planning this trip for a year. The social workers refused to let us take Omar with us and forced us to leave him with a respite foster parent who was hosting a couple of other kids in her house. It was after this incident that Omar started to have complete melt-downs for no reason at all. Poor little guy, he didn’t know what was happening to him. I have a hard time forgiving the powers that be for making that call. I also have a hard time forgiving myself for not cancelling that trip.

Whenever we travelled anywhere at all, to the mountains to see Nick’s parents, to Kentucky to see my family, we had to get permission to take Omar with us. We were on pins and needles for three years.

I was required to take Omar to regularly-scheduled doctors visits and to report the outcome of these visits to his social workers. Omar had a constantly-running nose, post nasal drip which made him gag and then projectile vomit and he suffered chronic ear infections. The Medicaid doctors who treated him would always prescribe antibiotics, which I knew even back then was a dangerous solution. But I couldn’t go against doctor’s orders for fear of being labelled negligent, so I felt that my hand was forced. I was mad.

Little toddler Omar was also regularly subjected to a battery of developmental assessments and tests. Appointment after appointment was made to identify his strengths and challenges even though his development had been on track since birth. His social workers made perfunctory notes about my observations of Omar’s behavior as a foster parent, but were much more interested in having his cognitive, social, emotional, language and physical development measured by an “expert.” It wasn’t until later in the process that I wondered how many of these “experts” had lucrative contracts with the state of North Carolina. (They loved their “services.”) With so many hundreds of foster children cycling through the system each year, everyone was motivated to keep the testing going. I was determined to see that Omar passed these tests with flying colors. I remember one test, probably assessing his motor skills, involved stacking blocks. Now, Omar was a master block tower destroyer, but as far as stacking, not so much. We’d sit on the braided rug in the living room and practice.

“Come on, Buddy, you can do it,” I’d say, handing him a wooden block and showing him myself how it was done. He laughed with glee kicking down my neat stacks. Like with all the other developmental skills (right up until today), Omar developed them when he was ready and not when the experts told him it was time. 

When Omar was three, the experts determined that he was in need of Speech Therapy. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said to the expert. “Because he says th instead of his S’s and f instead of th? He’s three years old.” But I wasn’t in charge of Omar’s life, I had signed up to do what the state told me to do. Omar hated going to all of these appointments. Imagine Omar, a little brown ball of energy. Omar literally bounced off walls. Nick said it was like trying to take a squirrel out in public. Waiting rooms were torture for him and I was a nervous wreck trying to contain him. At home, he danced and spun and ran and discovered that he could use his yellow plastic shopping cart as a battering ram to plow through the baby gates we’d put up.

When I’d set up Omar’s first appointment with the Speech Therapist, I had made my opinion clear, I didn’t think a three-year-old needed speech therapy. She didn’t care. The test said he did and that was good enough for her. I forced Omar into his car seat and drove down Wrightsville Avenue to find her office. Past St. Andrews on the Sound, the houses on stilts, over Bradley Creek, past the hospital, Tidal Market…

“Okay, Omar, here we go,” I said, trying to make it sound fun and not like a doctor’s appointment.

“Hello, Mrs. Searcy,” the attractive young woman fresh out of college said in a formal way when she came into the waiting room to greet us. “Hi Omar, I’m Miss Melissa.” She leaned down to greet him, but his wiggling prevented her from making the eye contact she sought. “How old are you?”

“Free,” said Omar.

“See?” I gestured to him like Vanna White. “Adorable!”

Melissa just stared at me, appalled. She probably thought she’d have more luck with Omar, so turning back to him, promised him that they would be playing some “games.” Omar reluctantly agreed to take her hand and be escorted into her office. I had an hour to kill, so I crossed Wrightsville Avenue to grab a latte and read the local magazine. I bought a strawberry and banana smoothie for Omar and presented it to him when he came running out of the therapist’s office.

“Good job, Buddy. I’m proud of you,” I said, pulling the paper off the straw and inserting it in his to-go cup. “Do you want to come back next week and play some more games with Miss Melissa?”

“No,” he answered and focussed on his drink.

I dragged him to therapy the following week and the following and so on, each week having more difficulty convincing him of how much fun he was going to have. I just flat-out started bribing him with a weekly smoothie if he would agree to go without a fuss. To top it all off, I couldn’t see any improvement in his speech at all. When I brought him in for his fourth or fifth appointment, he refused to go into Miss Melissa’s office altogether. He hung on to my leg and whined, saying he didn’t want to go. I could see Miss Melissa was not amused. She put on a wheedling voice that all therapists must learn in therapy school.

“Omar, don’t you want to go into Miss Melissa’s office and play some games?”

Omar answered in the negative.

“Don’t you want to play on the computer in Miss Melissa’s office, Omar? You like the computer, right?” she said.

Omar answered again in the negative and started trying to drag me out by the pant leg. Miss Melissa put her hands on her knees and said in a challenging way, “Omar, let me ask you a question,” Omar stopped squirming to look at her. “If you don’t want to play games with me, why did you come here today?”

Omar looked at her. “For da foovie.”

I can’t remember if I was successful at keeping myself from laughing out loud, but I do remember feeling a little thrill of victory on Omar’s behalf. Human Spirit vs. The Machine. I wish I had acted with more grace, that I had been less stressed out by the whole process of dealing with the insanity of the bureaucracy. I wish I had been better informed to begin with. I wish I had come to a place of acceptance sooner, but there’s no way to go back and change the past. The state never actually succeeded in freeing Omar for adoption before we decided we needed to move our family to Los Angeles. Nick and I finally just asked Omar’s parents to relinquish their rights, and they did. But that’s a story for another day. 

I passed the building that had housed Miss Melissa’s office and continued down Wrightsville Avenue to pick Dominique up for lunch and shopping, smiling to myself. Wilmington brought both painful and beautiful moments back to me, those building blocks that made Nick, Chloe, Omar and me who we are. I guess, in the end, I wouldn’t change a thing.