Mothers Who Write: Beth Winegarner
“Up! Up! Up!”
By Beth Winegarner
“Up! Up! Up!”
That’s my 17-month-old daughter. She has pushed a chair into the middle of the kitchen and climbed up onto it, and now she is asking to go higher.
She just learned to say “up,” and what it means, a couple of weeks ago. Now it is her favorite word, repeated 50 times a day. A request. A demand. To be picked up, held higher, made taller, and – rarely – to be helped down.
As a writer, I often wondered what her first words would be, and how she would use language as she began to discover how it worked. Before she could use her mouth to talk, we taught her sign language; her first word was “milk,” which is signed as though you are milking a cow and giving a thumb’s-up at the same time. Being able to request a few quiet moments with mama’s milk is still one of her favorite things, though these days she’s as likely to sign as to pat my chest and say, “boob!”
In the beginning, it seemed she would use words to get her most basic needs met. After “milk,” she learned to sign “more,” “eat,” and “banana.” It seemed fitting that she would focus on this kind of communication. After all, if you were new in a world whose language you didn’t speak, the first thing you would want to be able to say is “I’m hungry,” “I’m thirsty,” “I’m tired,” “I’m cold.”
But she had more in mind than simply making her needs known. She continued to expand her vocabulary of signs – mostly so she could take note of the world around her. Early on she learned to sign “cat,” due to her love of our cat – and “gentle,” which we taught her as an antidote to the rough way she often shows that love.
Her first spoken words came soon after, and they seemed more like expressions of passion than anything else, and not easy ones, either: “shoes” and “cheese.” It was some months before she learned to say “Mama” and “Dada” or, her preferred terms, “Mommy” and “Papa.” Nope, “shoes” and “cheese” were utmost – the peak where the twin slopes of her enthusiasm and vocal ability met. After that, she took to pointing at objects and asking “that?” over and over, prompting us to name the item in her crosshairs.
She has learned many signs and words since – and most of them are this latter category. Certainly there are things she’d love to be able to say that she simply can’t, either because we haven’t thought to teach her the sign or because her mouth and throat can’t form the words. But of the ones she has picked up, the majority are words for things in her environment: trees and flowers, the noises of animals, babies and doggies, fruit and fish.
Most recently, she has been studying the alphabet like a pre-law student cramming for the LSAT. She brings me her alphabet book, or a set of ABC blocks, dozens of times each week. Something inside her is telling her that this is important, and within a couple of weeks she has learned how to say almost every letter. She claps when I sing the alphabet song, and signs “more” to request encore performances. Oddly, this makes me think of Kali, the violent Hindu mother goddess, who wears a string of 51 skulls around her neck – each one representing a letter of the Sanskrit alphabet.
This is where language is born, this interplay of parent and child. The parent, keeper of letters and words, guesses (or is sometimes prompted for) the words the child wishes to learn, and repeats them until the child echoes back. Vocabulary tumbles out, a brew of need, fascination, and ability.
This process has mirrored my writing life, particularly my work as a poet and as a journalist. In those roles, it has been my job to search for the right words and assemble them in a way that expresses what the reader, until reading them, has not been able to express. I am oddly comfortable with the process of leading an audience, whether it’s a toddler or a community, to the language I hope will help them say what they need, what they love most, what they are feeling. I am also oddly comfortable with the idea that this is an imperfect process; I will not always pick the perfect words, and I will overlook some of them altogether because they’re not part of my vernacular.
Someday, my daughter will be able to say almost everything she feels, thinks, and dreams. She will teach me words, ideas, and emotions that I didn’t know – or had forgotten. She will also choose not to share some of those things with me; part of fluency is knowing what not to say. Until then, “Up! Up! Up!” – we will keep learning how to use language together.
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