Voiceless

VOICELESS

Selective mutism is, according to Wikipedia, "an anxiety disorder in which a person normally capable of speech cannot speak in specific situations or to specific people". Psychologists still find it difficult to pin down the reasons why anxiety may manifest in selective mutism.

My memory of my first day of school is—as I expect is normal—different to that of my mum’s. I remember the classroom, slightly darkened, coloured streamers hanging from the roof. Preschool children running, shouting, playing boardgames or dress-ups in one of the classroom corners. I remember holding my mum’s hand tightly. I remember my teacher—although I can’t picture what she looked like—greeting us by the door. I remember, as though an onlooker, her scolding my mum because I didn’t have a ribbon in my hair. Now, fifteen years on, I can just imagine my mum’s reaction to such strongly disciplinary behaviour towards the parents—her tight smile and narrowed eyes.

             Then Mum left—she says I cried, but I don’t remember doing so. My memory skips to the part when the gaggle of pre-schoolers were seated on the carpet, in front of the teacher’s chair. She pulled out the attendance roll.

             My surname, Brighton, was second on the roll. I have always remembered the boy who came before me for the first four years of my schooling life: surname Allens. He would go on to be expelled and I would meet him at a party, ten years on, and not recognise him beneath the dreadlocks. I remember him because, until the teacher had called his name and he had responded, I was a normal, speaking child.

             Not until the boy of surname Allens had said “Here”, and the teacher called out, “Ann? Ann Brighton?” did I stop speaking.

             I don’t remember what went through my head in that moment. But I know I looked at the teacher, in her smart blouse and pencil skirt with the stockings—stockings, for God’s sake, which the female staff at this particular school still wear, in 2020—and her low-heeled shoes. I looked around at my fellow pre-schoolers, in their fancy uniforms—a (rather comfortable) T-shirt with its button-on cravat, and those odd inventions called skorts—all looking so neat and formal and serious. I was now at school, and that meant strict rules and no mistakes allowed.

Meanwhile, a bigger crowd of children than I had been part of in my life was now staring, silently, at me.

             So I put up my hand, and said nothing.

I started off Grade 1 with a teacher called Miss Hurst. At the age of six, I was very nearly as tall as her. Her daughter was in the year above us, and somehow knew who I was. She would say hello to me in the playground, and I would smile back. I thought she was SO cool.

             Half-way through that year, Miss Hurst became Mrs Kirna and left to have a baby. She was replaced with a woman called Mrs Jones, who was terribly overweight and wobbled around the classroom on her small feet in their black flats. It was probably fortunate she never wore heels.

             Mrs Jones was significant for me, although I didn’t realise it at the time. Once a week, small groups took turns to read with her. When she realised I wouldn’t speak to her—even though we were supposed to read aloud—she asked me to mouth the words. While many of the other children struggled with reading, I could read an entire kids’ book, and I began to mouth what I read.

             If it was a breakthrough, it wasn’t to last. Mrs Jones made me feel comfortable, and maybe if I’d had another six months in her class I would have started to speak to her. But then the year ended, and my next teacher was not to be so approachable.

I’d known my nanny, DeDe, since I was six months old. Mum tells me I was a fussy baby, and I didn’t like to be carried by anyone except her. If she put me into someone else’s arms, I would wail until she took me back. But when she put me in DeDe's arms, I smiled.

             DeDe was an older Scottish woman whom Mum hired when her Masters supervisor told her he didn’t care that she had just had a baby, she was going to finish her thesis that year. DeDe was the one who taught me to sew buttons onto a hanky, and the one who actively encouraged my imagination. I remember, at four years old, walking around the dam on our property, which was surrounded in places by ferns. DeDe told me bears lived in those ferns, and we would leave apples out overnight for them. When we came back the next morning the apples would always be gone—but I suspect it was the possums, rather than any bears, that got them.

             I had never had any trouble speaking to her—and I never thought about what it must have been like, for her to arrive at my house one morning and find me silent.

             But she wasn’t going to stand for that. She worked so hard to get me to speak again. I remember us sitting in chairs, facing each other, several metres apart. I had a yellow squishy ball, about the size of my head, with tentacles coming out from the sides almost like the sun’s rays, that I had got at the Exhibition Fair one year. DeDe would shut her eyes, pretending to be blind, and hold out her hands. I had to throw the ball to her, and if I said ‘catch’ loud enough that she could hear it, she would catch it. If she didn’t hear me, it would hit her in the face or the chest and bounce off. I enjoyed that game. So much so that I managed to say ‘catch’ out loud.

My Grade 2 teacher’s name was Miss O'Neill. She was tall and thin, with black hair pulled severely into a ponytail and a patronising smile. She seemed to speak down to us, as though seven-year-olds were stupid.

             During reading one time, she pulled me aside and said, “Mrs Jones told me you would mouth to her. Can you do that for me?” And she smiled. Patronisingly.

             I did not open my mouth once during reading time.

             That year we had our ‘Impossible Pet’ project. Anyone who went through Year 2 at my school has fond memories of the Impossible Pet. It was an indelible part of the year. I chose about nine animals to include in my Impossible Pet, and fashioned a name which was a jumble of all of them. It could have been in the running for longest word in the world, if not for ‘hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia’ (look it up—it’s weirder than selective mutism). Even then, my Impossible Pet name would have given it a run for its money. I combined a giraffe, an elephant, a possum, and several other animals I can no longer remember into one fantastical creature that I was very proud of.

I learned a few years later that the students were now restricted to two animals.

             The problem with the Impossible Pet project was that we had to present our Pet at the end of the year to all the students and their parents. We had to write a speech, which we would give on stage—yes, a stage—to a sea of expectant faces.

             The idea didn’t fill me with dread. No, I wasn’t afraid. I just knew that I could not do it. In my mind, it was that simple. I did not speak to adults. And I certainly didn’t speak to a room full of them.

             “I want you to try,” Miss O'Neill said to me, after she pulled me aside. “If you can’t do it, I’ll help you.”

             I might be being a little unfair to Miss O'Neill. I’m sure she was very nice. Some years after she taught me, she resigned from the school and became a private tutor, where she tutored my brother. He seemed to like her. But she didn’t make a good impression on the seven-year-old me.

             On the last day of school, we blew up balloons and Miss O'Neill tied streamers to the roof and parents milled around the classroom. The atmosphere was festive. A balloon drifted to the ceiling and kids leapt, trying to grab it. I grabbed hold of its string. It is the one time, in about five years, that I remember not minding how tall I was.

             From there, my memory cuts to the point where I stood on the stage, my speech resting on a music stand—our makeshift lectern—staring out at the parents and students, all watching me. I glanced down at my speech, then looked at Miss O'Neill. She came over and read my speech for me.

             I failed that part of the assignment.

Our Year 2 cohort was spread over four classes, which took up the four rooms in B Block. Aside from Miss O'Neill, there was Mrs Pretz, whom everyone loved and wished was their teacher; Miss Thomas, who had the curliest, red-brown hair you have ever seen; and Mrs Grey, who had long blonde hair and was, to me, the scariest person in my little world.

             One day, Miss O'Neill said, “I need someone sensible to take these thumbtacks to another class.” Many people put up their hands, but she chose me. I suppose I should have been pleased to be the ‘sensible’ one in the class, but she was sending me to 2C. Mrs Grey's class.

             Miss O'Neill chose my best friend at the time, Harriet, to come with me. We walked the length of two classrooms, and arrived at 2C. We knocked. Mrs Grey came to the door. I offered her the thumbtacks.

             “What are these?” she said.

             “Thumbtacks,” Harriet said. “From Miss O'Neill.”

             “I asked you,” Mrs Grey said, looking at me. “What do you have here?”

             I showed her again.

             I think she sighed, or shook her head. “Thumbtacks, are they?”

             I nodded.

             “It’s polite to use your words,” she said. “Say, ‘yes, Mrs Grey.”

             When I nodded again, she bent down to look at me. “Say, ‘yes, Mrs Grey,” she repeated.

             I just looked at her.

             Eventually she let us go, and Harriet and I walked back to our classroom.

             Mrs Grey taught my brother several years later, in preschool, and he was quite fond of her. But when the girl who was to become my lifelong best friend, Tara, later told me she had once had nightmares about Mrs Grey, I didn’t feel so unjustified in my seven-year-old’s fear of her.

In Grade 3, my teacher’s name was Mrs Rothschild. She had long black hair and a rather padded body, and would walk around saying things like, “There’s a water bottle I could fall on and break my neck," and, "There’s a tissue I could fall on and break my neck.” Students would scurry around the classroom, picking up bits of rubbish so Mrs Rothschild wouldn’t ‘fall and break her neck’.

             She was the first teacher I spoke to, albeit accidentally, in over three years.

             We were doing maths in our weekly rotation, and Mrs Rothschild was teaching us decimal points. As she told us to finish the problem while she got some water, I put up my hand. She crouched next to me.

             “I don’t understand,” I said, of the decimal problem.

             She explained that it was just like fractions, just in a different form, and I got it. When she came back with her water bottle, she crouched down again and said, “You know, that’s the first time you’ve spoken to me. You have a beautiful voice.”

             I hadn’t even realised I had spoken. Maybe I felt so comfortable with her that it was easy, or maybe I was finally ready to speak again.

             But I think those three words I spoke to Mrs Rothschild gave her hope—or confidence, or whatever you want to call it. On the last day of term 2, right before the winter holidays, she caught me before I left and said in a low voice, “When you come back next term, I want you to say ‘good morning’ to me.”

             I dreaded the start of term 3.

             When we came into the classroom each morning, we had to walk through it, past the desk where Mrs Rothschild invariably sat before class, to hang our hats on the hooks on the other side of the building. On the first day of term 3, I managed to get past her to the hat hooks by holding my hat on the side of my face so she couldn’t see me. But on the way back I had no hat, and she saw me.

             “Ann!” she laughed. “How did you get past me?”

             I shrugged.

             She bent down to look at me. “Good morning,” she said.

             It took a few moments, but eventually I murmured, “Good morning, Mrs Rothschild.”

             She smiled at me, and said, “Good girl.”

             Relieved, I ran off to play with my friends.

             That was the turning point. Something had changed in that moment. When the bell rang and we all lined up outside our classroom, waiting for Mrs Rothschild to let us in—a daily ritual which we followed diligently—I realised I felt a little bit happy. And when we filed in, each saying ‘Good morning’ to Mrs Rothschild on the way, she nodded at me and said, “You’ve already said ‘good morning’ to me.” I felt so proud of myself.

Mrs Harries was my Year 5 English and Humanities teacher. She looked very like Mrs Rothschild and, since she had taken over one term in from a man who would sing songs about frogs to us on his guitar instead of teaching us English, our class instantly liked her.

I remember this one day, during group presentations. In our group of five, we each made a poster on a different aspect of the Gold Rush. I presented my poster, then began rolling it up again as the next girl in our group started to speak. I didn’t realise no one could hear her over the noise my poster made—until Mrs Harries asked me to wait until all the presentations were done before I packed it up. I was instantly chastened.

Afterwards, Mrs Harries asked me to wait behind. Maybe she could see I was upset. She said, “You’ve had some issues with public speaking before, haven’t you?” I don’t know how much of my history she knew, but I found myself sobbing into her bosom. She held me and told me it was okay.

I decided I was never going to make a fool of myself in a presentation again.

Mum tells me that both the medication I was on, which I don’t remember, and the psychiatry sessions, which I hated, helped me overcome my anxiety and speak again. Perhaps they did. But I hold that the most important decision she made was to enrol me in after-school drama classes.

             The first production I was in, in Year 4, I barely whispered my lines, and clapped once to let the rest of the cast know I had spoken and they could continue. From there, there was only one way to go, and that was up.

             I remember vividly the moment I thought, I can do this. In Year 5, the drama group put on a play based on Dr Seuss’s books. The whole production was spoken in rhyme—except for one line, which our drama teacher, Miss Salmon, added in. When the group turned to run off stage, one person was to stay behind a moment and say, “Now, this is going to get a little bit … interesting.”

             And she chose me to say that line.

             That was the moment I realised that I wasn’t the girl who would whisper her lines on stage anymore. Miss Salmon thought I was the best person to deliver an extra line. To a ten-year-old, that was incredibly exciting.

             There was a time when I wanted to be an actress. Mum despaired of me ever working anywhere except a coffee shop. Luckily I decided against that career, well before I realised that I was, in fact, a terrible actor. But the courage to stand on a stage, unafraid—that was one of the most important skills I could have gained.

10 years later

I stepped off the stage to the smattering of applause. The exhalation still thrilled through my body. I looked up at my final PowerPoint slide, projected onto the screen—the words In conclusion, biological remediation is a cost-effective and hands-free approach to reducing the impact of alkaline bauxite residue staring at me—and smiled. I knew my presentation had been good. No, I knew my presentation had been great.

             And I had just proven to myself that, if a girl who spoke to no more than three adults over the course of three and a half years can one day get up on a stage in front of hundreds of people and give a presentation without a flicker of fear—and enjoy every minute of it—then anyone can do anything.