A Household Word: My Son's Not Talking

By Carol Band

I can count on him to belch the Pledge of Allegiance at Thanksgiving dinner, and he always speaks up on allowance day, but getting any real information out of the child is practically impossible.

My 12-year-old son, Lewis, doesn't talk. Oh sure, he can regale the dinner table with blonde jokes that he heard in the middle school cafeteria ("A blonde and a brunette walked into a building … the brunette used the door!"). I can count on him to belch the Pledge of Allegiance at Thanksgiving dinner, and he always speaks up on allowance day, but getting any real information out of the child is practically impossible.

Believe me, I try. Just today, he came home from school and we had this meaningful exchange:

"How was school?"

"Normal."

"What did you do?"

"Nothing."

"Did you get any papers back?"

"I don't think so."

"What did you have for lunch?"

"I don't remember."

"Do you have any homework?"

"Mmmmrgrrff. …" His reply was muffled by a mouthful of microwave popcorn.

Then the phone rang. It was my friend Bev. Her son is in Lew's class. "Did you hear about what happened after school today?" she asked.

She knows I didn't hear. She knows that I never hear about the lunchroom brawls, the middle-school romances or who said what to whom on the bus. My kid doesn't talk.

Her son, however, is a fount of information. He tells her who brought what for lunch, who threw up in the Friday assembly and which sixth-grade boy already has armpit hair. I can count on her to know when the social studies project is due, if I need to pack a lunch for the field trip and whether my son scored a goal at soccer practice. Her kid talks.

"Well," she continued, "Sam came home from school very upset. Apparently there was some kind of fight."

"Hang on a sec, OK?"

I look at my son for signs of bruising or trauma. He is digging into a carton of cookie-dough ice cream and appears unscathed.

"Are you OK?" I ask.

"Huh?" he says, as he pours Hershey's syrup onto his ice cream.

I don't know. Maybe I should be worried. I mean, the child is gone everyday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. and when he comes home all he can relate is a blonde joke that someone told at lunch?

"Bev, are you still there?"