Word Trolls

My boy's words tumble out of his mouth like those little rock trolls in Frozen. Yep…I've got a Frozen metaphor for this.

Maybe one day I'll write a post about how much I dig that film—despite its numerous weaknesses—and how much I respect that the protagonist makes my daughter swell and spill over with emotion that even she, articulate and expressive as she is, cannot explain. How her connection to the story seems to be rooted in something that has existed for ages, longer than she or I have been here. That film has redefined what "princess" means to her: when she was a toddler and I asked her why she liked princesses, she could only offer, "Because they spin." But now…NOW…a princess is a woman with powers, with a resounding voice and a great dress, with fierce hair and determined eyes, with conviction and huge love. Not afraid to defend herself, courageous, intense, graceful. And, yes. Elsa is a righteous inspiration to me, my daughter's mother. She is an awakening from a fitful sleep.

Where was I?

Right. The trolls. Those rolling balls that look like rocks until they unfold into chattering, wise, loving, communal beings. Their words climb over each other. Inside of my son's mouth, the tongue and teeth are wrestling with the language, and his lisp adheres his words together so that his gigantic sentence starts as a puffy, packed ball of language that he works to eek out of his mouth. Sometimes, the whole sentence falls out still tightly wound, and I have to untangle it in my own mind to know what he's saying. Sometimes, the words fall over one another as they exit one by one on piggyback, all mashed around in fuzzy, salivary somersaults. This morning, his sentences stumbled through: "Mommy, she [his sister] needs juice, and so when we go downstairs, she will have some juice and she will feel better. And I will have juice, too!" It was a magnificent idea. And though we didn't actually drink juice, the juicy idea of juice and how it might unplug a stuffy nose and lift the spirits was delightful.

I am fluent in my son's language. But it's more than the communication of the message itself that locks us into place when we talk. It's not just the impressive presence of the words that draws me into the voyage they take from his mind to mine…it's the voyage itself, from brain to clear air outside of his mouth. It's the delicious experience of watching and hearing the sentences work themselves out, and observing the developing gestures in his little hands. The intonation of his little grumble-laugh at the end of his point. Each word is a little rock troll, so sincerely eager to unpack, burst open, and convey to us its sagacity, humor, outrage, confusion, tender advice, and astute remarks on the world that this tiny boy is trying to understand.