A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

I haven’t seen The King’s Speech. I’d like to. We don’t get movies out here, so I suppose I will see it whenever it comes on cable.

It’s a film about the King of England’s speech impediment and his relationship with his therapist, and it won all kinds of awards. It also precipitated a number of articles about the isolation caused by speech problems.

I had speech therapy for both a lisp and a stutter when I was in high school.

I knew I had a stutter, but I don’t recall anyone ever making a big deal about it. I trained myself to handle it fairly early on. Avoid W, mostly. It got worse when I got tired, and if I got tired, I just didn’t see any point in speaking anyway.

I had no idea I had a lisp until my parents were called to a conference. It was all very hush-hush. I sat outside the guidance counselor’s office in mortal terror, waiting to find out what the hell I had done wrong. My mom emerged from the office, her face twisted in disgust – not with me, of course, but with the school for creating mystery and drama where none was necessary.

“You’ve got to take speech therapy,” she said.

“That’s all? That’s the big secret?”

The school was afraid of hurting my tender feelings, so instead of simply telling me they felt I needed therapy, they kept me in the dark about the nature of the parent/counselor conference and subjected me to the public humiliation of having my parents summoned while I sat in the hall. I never felt a moment of embarrassment or isolation about my speech problem until the day the school made a scene about it.

Blissfully unaware that there was anything genuinely wrong with me, despite my handicap, I’d landed the lead in the school musical. I stood up in front of 1500 people and lisped away. This precipitated a number of complaints about my lousy diction. Not one of these people came to me. Instead, they went to the school and complained about me. I thought that was pretty dickish, but at least it prepared me for the internet.

The very nice lady to whom I was sent for therapy was a Mrs. Fiskus. After some time, I got my release from the ritual of practicing the S sound, which was dandy, since it was time for summer break, and now I could pronounce summer like a champ.

I didn’t go through anything like the trauma of many other people with speech problems. I had fun times with Mrs. Fiskus. I’d never heard my voice recorded before. When Mrs. Fiskus played it back to me over and over, the problem was clear, and fixing it seemed like a good thing to do. I recall my drama teacher saying “We think you are going to be somebody, so we just want to help you.”

I think I would have felt better about it if I had been directly addressed about the matter instead of having the school have a meeting and then do an end run to my parents, like I would fracture were I to be confronted with the objective reality of my difficulty with the letter W. I don’t know if this is the sort of thing schools just do as a matter of course or not.

I still lisp a little, and I still stutter a bit. But it doesn’t bother me much, and no one mentions it.

Here’s a nice article on the real teacher behind The King’s Speech.

It makes me wonder about Mrs. Fiskus, about whom I know very little.

Thank you, Mrs. Fiskus.