In 1983, when I was six years old, I entered first grade and my first struggle over my given name. My mother claimed she agreed to name me Desirée because “It was a better choice than the Nazi names your father liked.” Apparently, my father had suggested they name me, his first child and my mother’s third, Heidi or Gretchen. My father had a different origin story about my name and, well, my existence. One day in the late 1970s, my dad was using a Ouija board and the planchette spelled out the names S-U-S-A-N (my mother’s name) and D-E-S-I-R-E-E. A few years later when he met my mother, he felt obligated to be with a woman he “hated immediately” because the Ouija board directed him to bring me into existence. My dad’s tale is pretty funny given that, in French, my name means “desired one.” While my parents disagreed about most things, they both loved listening to Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” and they agreed to spell my name with only one accent mark.
My parents stayed married for only a few years because my father was unable or unwilling to stop pinching and twisting the skin of my siblings and me. But by the time I started first grade, my mother had fallen in love again and moved us into her new boyfriend’s house deep into the woods of central Vermont. I liked her boyfriend well enough even though he beat my mother regularly throughout their five-year relationship. He always talked to me more than my mother and siblings talked to me, and he and I also shared a love of listening to Bob Dylan’s Infidel and Blood on the Tracks. I have no real defense for my attachment to the man who terrorized my mother for years; sometimes, I still look for him online. I can only confess that I was young, lonely, and confused.
My father also met someone shortly after my parents divorced, and I loved the woman who became my stepmother. I admired her sophistication (she had lived in India, Denmark, Kenya, England, France, and New York City), her book collection (neither of my parents read much), and the art she made on weekends (she included me in the production and selling of her crafts). So, when my stepmother told me that in Paris they spelled “Désirée” with two accent marks and that the French pronounced my name Dayz-er-ray instead of Dez-er-ray, I began writing my name with two accent marks while not insisting that anyone around me change how they pronounced my name.
I can’t remember now if I changed how I spelled my name after my first-grade year began, or if I broke out the two accent marks right at the beginning of the fall. While I think it was the latter, it doesn’t matter much because the problem was that my first-grade teacher insisted that my name be written with only one accent mark, while I refused to use any less than two. I am not saying my teacher was in the wrong, merely that it was an intractable problem. Our conflict continued for a few months until one day a lanky teenager showed up at the door of my classroom and announced, “I’m here for Desiree Johnson.” I immediately assumed that my teacher had ratted me out, and that I was being sent to the principal’s office. Instead, my high school escort surprised me by dropping me at the door to the special education room.
In the 1980s and 1990s, at least in the schools I attended, “special education” was the term that covered any services or extra help students required to complete their work or function in school. Kids who received this help were derogatorily called SPEDs by other students.
My older brother was a SPED because he could barely read, which, of course, also made him a dumb ass. Even though he was eighteen when he finally dropped out of high school (he didn’t graduate because he refused to participate in gym class), my brother had only ever “achieved” a third grade reading level. My brother, however, was not just a SPED. At least on one occasion, my brother threw his school desk at a teacher during class. He also used to brag about making another boy bleed when he, my brother, gave the younger boy a wedgie of such ferocity that it broke the skin around the boy’s anus.
A lot of the SPEDs couldn’t read and most were boys. A disproportionate number of them lived at The Boys Home, which was either an orphanage or a “therapeutic boarding school” located less than a mile down the road from our elementary school. We lived in a small dairy farm town with less than a thousand residents, so everyone knew who was from The Boys Home and who was a SPED. This, of course, was another key element of being a SPED—most of us were not from the working class but from the underclass. Though, there were a few middle-income kids, but they qualified because they were severely impaired and not because they acted out, and no one dared to call them SPEDs.
Even if I didn’t consciously know the SPED requirements in first grade, I intuitively knew that I wasn’t the same as my brother and the other little aggressors from The Boys Home. I understood why my teacher might send me to the principal’s office—It seemed like I spent half of kindergarten standing in the corner with my back to my classmates as punishment for talking and moving too much, and I hadn’t started behaving any better in first grade —but I didn’t understand how I could possibly be a SPED. My brother was four years older than I, but even in first grade I knew I was smarter than he. Not only could I read; I loved to read—from food labels to Little House in the Big Woods—and I read every moment I wasn’t talking. Yes, I talked too much. Yes, I had no friends. Yes, my teachers didn’t like me, but how could I possibly be retarded?
Unbeknownst to six-year-old me, I had a speech impediment—specifically a slur—and, apparently, my slur was severe enough to qualify me for special education services. A slur is different from a lisp, though both are problems with making ess sounds. With a lisp, one makes a “th” sound for esses–think Destheray. Instead, my slur made my esses sound sloppy (shloppy). So instead of pronouncing my name correctly as Dez-er-ray (or Dayz-e-ray), I called myself Desheray Johnshon.
I met my first speech-language pathologist that day I was abandoned in the doorway to the world of special education. A speech-language pathologist can also be called a “speech therapist” or “SLP,” and I can’t remember what I called mine or even her given name. What I do remember, however, is that she was what is colloquially known as a Catholic nun; though, she was in fact a Catholic sister, which is why she was working outside of the convent.
My SLP was short, under five feet, and whip thin. She had a bowl haircut and white hair, which made her look like Andy Warhol. Unlike Andy Warhol, however, Sister Warhol wasn’t wearing a black turtleneck or even a black habit; instead, she was wearing jeans, duck boots, and a plaid flannel shirt like all the other women in our rural town, most of whom were farmers. Everything I thought I knew about nuns I learned from watching The Sound of Music on the tiny black and white TV at my dad’s house, so I was surprised to learn that Sister Warhol was indeed still a part of a religious community even though she was working with SPEDs. Who would think that people close to God would want anything to do with us?
During our first meeting, Sister Warhol must have noticed that not only did I slur, “Hello, Sishter,” but that I also moved my body endlessly, chewed my hair ferociously, and talked incessantly. I was a swirling dervish of bruised limbs, sloppy words, and wet stringy hair that sometimes slapped me in the face leaving a rash: very attractive. While speech therapists are qualified to help kids with ADHD manage their impulsivity, hyperactivity, overwhelming emotions, and difficulty reading social cues, Sister rightfully ignored all of that to work on my speech.
She told me to curl my tongue into the shape of a crunchy taco shell (my visual, not hers) and push the sides of my tongue against the roof of my mouth. From there, I was to push my ess sounds through the tip of my tongue. Yet, each time I tried to move an ess through my crunchy taco, I failed, and a slushy sound dropped from the sides of my tongue. When I told Sister that I was unable to do as she asked—I physically could not curl my tongue, nor could I hold it against my top palette—she told me to try harder. Despite Sister’s training, long sighs, and suggested exercises, the clarity of my speech never improved, and our sessions eventually ended.
By the start of 6th grade, my mother had gotten sober and had left her abusive boyfriend, my SPED brother had tried to kill himself and had been committed to a mental hospital, and I still couldn’t talk correctly. My mom relocated our family from the deep woods of rural Vermont to the small Vermont city in which my brother was hospitalized all so that we could participate in family therapy and help him get better.
My brother was inpatient in the private mental hospital for about a year, and then he was moved into “long term care,” which was just a therapeutic boarding school for troubled boys. As a family, however, we only survived one session of family therapy. The therapist greeted us as we took our seats in an airy room outfitted with beautiful antiques. But within minutes, our mother slapped my sixteen-year-old sister and began strangling her. While my mother was busy parenting my sister, my brother jumped me—he kneed me in the stomach and then began choking me with both hands. Eventually, the therapist disentangled our crew, and we were never invited back.
Because of the move, I started in a new school system, and so I got a new speech therapist. Those sessions went about as well as our family therapy. I guess because I was older or maybe because we were living in a larger school district, I had daily and not just weekly speech therapy lessons. Yet, my slur persisted.
At some point between the end of 6th grade and the end of 8th grade, I went to the dentist. I don’t remember exactly which year this occurred, even though it turned out to be monumental moment in my life, because those were very busy years for me— budding and blossoming alcoholism, foster care, and lots of running away. I also don’t know why my mother brought me to the dentist; it wasn’t a regular thing in my house. Regardless, my mother brought me to the only dentist in town who accepted Medicaid and who was within walking distance of our apartment (my mom didn’t have a car), and my life changed.
The appointment started with some kind of tussle between my mom and the receptionist about our state insurance. Next, a hygienist cleaned my teeth. Then said hygienist fetched the dentist for the final “looksee.” As the dentist was rooting around in my mouth, he exclaimed, “Oh my God, you’re tongue-tied. That’s why you can’t talk.”
A “tongue-tie,” also called ankyloglossia, though not by anyone with an actual tied tongue, occurs when the lingual frenulum—the membrane that holds your tongue in place—is too short, tight, or thick, and so your tongue is “tied” to the bottom of your mouth. A friend of mine who is also a speech therapist told me recently that tongue-ties are “controversial.” Some doctors and SLPs believe that tongue-ties don’t have any negative consequences and too many infants are given unnecessary frenotomies (sometimes called frenectomies), the surgery that cuts the lingual frenulum. When she told me this, I literally scoffed and snorted at the same time— two words I can enunciate only because I have had a frenotomy.
M friend also told me that there are degrees of tongue-tie impairment. A quick internet search shows that tongue ties are ranked from 1, which is mild impairment, to 4, where the tongue can barely move. Self-diagnosing, mine must have been either a 3 or a 4 because I could barely push the tip of my tongue past my bottom teeth. Moreover, my tongue would often “lock” into place because the frenulum was so tight, and I’d have to use my hands to release it.
Anyway, after telling me that I was tongue tied, the dentist said, “Stay here. I’m going to get your mother. This is an easy fix.” He was right. A few weeks later, I had an outpatient frenectomy. After the swelling and pain subsided, I could finally speak clearly—most of the time. Nearly thirty years after surgery, I might still slur if I’m exhausted and trying to fight sleep. My husband laughs when he hears my messy taco voice because he knows I’m about to nod off against my will. Of course, though, my slur is only funny now because I don’t have it anymore.
My stepmother taught me to read before I entered Kindergarten. By the time I began seeing Sister Warhol, I was reading well enough to explore my stepmother’s books (she was very fond of ancient Egyptian art, Erté, and the occult). I read her book on palm reading and learned that one’s heart and headlines are the two long lines across the top of your palm. On my left hand, I have the typical two long lines. However, on my right hand, I have three lines instead of two. According to the author of my stepmother’s book on palmistry, the third line meant that either my headline or my heartline would split in half at some point during my life. When I thought about this as a small child, it felt mysterious, important, and fated.
When I got sober in 1996 four days before I turned nineteen, I had assumed that putting down the drink was The Split. Around that time, I started wondering about the relationship between the physical self and the spiritual self. The primary text of Alcoholics Anonymous states that alcoholism is a disease of the body, mind, and spirit—and that sometimes a “man” must be physically healed of his alcoholism before he is well enough to begin his spiritual and emotional recovery.
Of course, like everyone else who stays alive, I then experienced event after event, each of which could have qualified as a headline or heartline splitting. And as I grew older, I lost all interest in the palm reading prediction. As a sober person, I diligently explored my drinking life (and the first decade of my sobriety) to avoid repeating mistakes and to make amends to those I had harmed, but I never once looked back at my life before I could talk.
Then, something happened with my mother that made me wonder about the time before my frenotomy. Was I simply difficult to be around as a child because I was a bad kid or did my slur push people away. As a child, I was always in trouble with my teachers, and I didn’t have any friends. I was only invited to two social events before I was eleven: one was a birthday party that included the entire class, and the other was a sleepover—but I might have been invited to that sleepover because my mom had entered detox, and no one was home to watch me. I don’t remember my peers teasing me about my slur, so could I safely assume my social problems were related to how annoying I was as a kid?
I didn’t have friends, nor was I particularly close to my siblings. (My own daughters are best friends with each other.) My brother treated me like he treated the other kids he despised. Once, he choked me and held me underwater until I passed out while we were hanging out at the swimming hole behind The Boys Home. When I showed my mother the bruises, my brother defended himself by telling her it was because I had embarrassed him. Had I been mean—was I as bad as he? Was I being annoyingly hyperactive and chatty? Was my slur just simply too much for him to bear in front of his peers? Or was his behavior simply a reflection on him and not on me? From what I remember, my mother asked him not to do it again, but she also sympathized with how he was driven to do it because of my behavior.
My mother and I never spent much time together: she drank until I was ten, and I was drinking regularly by the time I was twelve. And by the time I started trying to get sober, she had entered a major depression—sitting in her bathrobe for days on end, letting her boyfriend’s three dogs shit in the house and not picking it up kind of depression. I moved out at seventeen, shortly after she accused me of having sex with the boyfriend who owned the three dogs.
My father, however, often made it clear that he did not like my slur. When I was seven or eight, my dad and I were at a family gathering with all six of his siblings, their partners, and my stepmother. My father was at the head of the two or three tables that had been pushed together to form a platform large enough to include everyone. While there were several people seated between my father and me, I must have said an “S” word loudly because he heard me. He whipped his head to look at me and bellowed, “Everyone shut up.”
Then he said, “Desiree, say that word correctly 100 times.”
Some of my relatives turned to look at me, some glanced at their partners. My father, however, continued to look directly at me, “Say it.”
I don’t remember the word that I had slurred, but let’s pretend it was “Santa.” So, at the table, my father said, “Say it.”
Then I said, “Shlanta.”
My father replied, “No. Say it again.”
“Shlanta.”
“Say it again.”
“Shlanta.”
As this back and forth continued, I heard one of my aunts say to my father, “Come on, that’s not fair.”
My father simply said, “She has to learn.”
I don’t remember how our standoff ended. I couldn’t say the word, but my father wasn’t a man to back down. My dad had two sons with my stepmother, and one of my baby brothers would sometimes refuse to eat the food he was served. When he was three or four, he would do this cute thing and push the unwanted food to the side of his mouth, which would make him look like a chipmunk.
In response to my brother’s willfulness, my father would get up from the table and stand behind my brother’s seat, which was always to my right and directly across from my stepmother. First, my dad would say to my brother, “You will fucking eat it.”
If my brother wouldn’t start chewing, our father would then punch the back of my brother’s head. If that didn’t work, and it never did, our father would push and grind my brother’s face into his plate of food. That only worked sometimes. If my brother still didn’t eat, our dad would rip my brother from his chair, pinch his nostrils with one hand, and simultaneously force my brother to shut his jaw. My brother would have to swallow the bite of pasta or whatever it was he had stored in his cheek just so that he could breathe again. You’ve never seen such a hero as my baby brother. He could withstand all my father gave until my father pulled out the underhanded nostril trick.
I share that story to tell you that my father was not opposed to using violence to manage his children, and I’m sure that the “Shlanta” incident didn’t end in physical violence. Though, it definitely ended with embarrassment, shame, and absolute outrage towards all the adults at the table who didn’t stand up for me and kick my father’s ass.
My relationships with my peers and family pretty much stayed the same until one day when I was twelve or thirteen, my dentist was rooting around in my mouth, and he said, “Oh my God, you’re tongue-tied. That’s why you can’t talk.”
My dentist had told me it would be an easy surgery, and he was right. He was also correct that I emerged from surgery able to speak clearly. What he didn’t tell me was that shortly after surgery, I would find a way to stop my weekend visits to my father’s house. I’ve seen my father maybe five times over these thirty years, and I haven’t spoken to him since my stepmother died fifteen years ago. My dentist also didn’t tell me that shortly after my surgery, I would hustle my way out of my mother’s house even though I was only in 8th grade, and that in fact, over a five-year period during middle and high school, I only lived with my mother for two years. My newfound gift of gab talked me into a foster care, then boarding school, and into jobs that provided enough to cover the bills of a high school student on her own. My dentist also didn’t tell me that I would graduate from high school, then college, then law school. And that I would end up happily married with two daughters whose needs require me to tame my agile tongue.
Now that I’m a mother, I know I was a difficult child and a burden to my own parents. I’m sure my slur was ugly and caused my family great embarrassment. Yet, I can’t quite give my parents the benefit of doubt by claiming they did the best that they could. Still, life is hard, and I don’t know why they were so ill-suited for raising children or why they never healed. I also don’t know why I’ve been so lucky in this life. Not only did that dentist correctly diagnose the cause of my slur, but I got to have a frenotomy that freed so much more than my tongue.
Désirée Johnson was born and raised in Vermont. She has worked too many jobs, including as a stocking associate at Walmart, a lawyer for her own practice, and a medical writer for a breast cancer non-profit. She is always grateful for her husband, daughters, pets, and modern medicine.