Onamatopoeia

Onomatopoeia.  That’s a word I haven’t thought about for quite a while.  You know it, right?  You probably learned it in language arts in 4^th or 5^th grade.  It’s the creation of a word that imitates natural sounds (Merriam Webster), such as buzz, hiss or chirp.  Such a long, complicated word for a simple concept.  And hard to pronounce.

Every Wednesday afternoon, I sit in a waiting room while one of my children receives speech therapy.  It’s an interesting mix of people in that waiting room from week –to-week.  Over the last several weeks I’ve shared the waiting room with a girl (who, based on her homework, must be in 4^th or 5^th grade) and her father.   She is an exceptional student.  I will spare you all of the reasons I know this to be true.  Week after week, her father gives her a pretty hard time about her academic success.  It is, honestly, pretty painful for me to observe.  In pushing her to excel, I see her confidence stripped away, one mistake at a time.  I try to distract myself by reading or checking e-mails.  We’ve all got different parenting styles.  He seems to be a stressed out dad.  I don’t know his back story.  So, while it’s not how I would choose to encourage academic success, I’ve tried not to judge.  He clearly loves her.  And she lights up talking to him when they are talking about things other than school.  It’s just that those conversations don’t happen very often in that tiny waiting room.  “Just keep your head in your book and ignore it,” I tell myself.

Then, it happened.  They were arguing about the pronunciation of the word onomatopoeia.  The girl was right, the father, well, he was not.  He was making her feel stupid.  You could see her posture change.  Her head hung.  I just couldn’t be silent this time.  I smiled and whispered to her, “You are right.”  She was shocked.  Her father glared.  Uh-oh, what did I just do?! The soundtrack of “Wicked” started playing in my head.  The big song at the end of the 1^st act.  “Defying Gravity.”  When Glynda admonishes Elphaba for not keeping quiet : “I hope you’re happy. I hope you’re happy now…I hope you think you’re clever!”  Did I just make things worse?!  Why didn’t I just keep quiet?  I’m naturally a quiet person, so that should have been an easy choice.  I’m an observer.  I feel intensely about lots of things I observe.  I am just more likely to go about acting on those observations quietly.  It works for me.  Although the whisper of ‘you’re right’ felt really loud to me, I said it anyway.  After a few moments, the tension in the waiting room changed subtly.  The dad got out his phone and looked up the pronunciation of onomatopoeia and discovered his daughter truly was right.  She smiled. He called her Miss Smarty Pants (which I didn’t love, but it’s a shift).  She smiled at me.  I made eye contact with another mom in the room, she smiled and nodded.  Did I change this girl’s life?  Probably not, but I hope, in that moment, I showed her that it’s worth speaking up, sometimes.  Even if it’s a whisper.  And I shifted her father’s attention from academics to having a loving conversation with his daughter.  They laughed a bit.   That makes my heart sing, in an onomatopoetic way.