But the language thing – surely that couldn’t be my fault? I talked to him all the time, repeated back his babbling sounds, did everything parents are supposed to do to encourage language development. And still he wasn’t talking. Was I a bad mother, or was there something seriously wrong with him? I wasn’t even sure which one I was rooting for. I just wished he’d start acting normal. The Pediatrician Gets Involved I remember Andrew’s two-year checkup, because it was the first time his delayed language came up as an issue. Early in the appointment, I had accidentally dropped something that rolled under the chair, and Andrew leaned over to see where the object had gone. The pediatrician said at the end of the appointment that he was concerned Andrew still wasn’t talking, given how “verbal” his parents were (i.e., we talked a lot), but then he said that he was reassured by the “appropriateness” of Andrew’s interest in the dropped object. The doctor said he just wasn’t sure whether there was a problem there or not, so he left the decision of whether to see a speech pathologist up to us. I was wildly relieved to hear someone I liked and trusted say that he didn’t see anything obviously wrong with Andrew, apart from a minor speech delay – so relieved that I ignored the little voice in my head that was saying, “But I know he’s different from other kids.” The pediatrician was an expert, right? And he wasn’t particularly worried? Great. I wanted so badly to believe that there wasn’t anything really wrong with Andrew that I didn’t acknowledge the fact that I spent a lot more time with Andrew than the doctor was able to, and I just ran out of there as fast as I could. But six months later, at the next checkup, the pediatrician admitted he was now concerned about Andrew’s lack of speech and recommended we take him to a speech therapist named Roberta Poster. So we did. We watched Roberta get to know Andrew and hoped she’d tell us that we were being silly, that he was perfectly normal, that we should just go home and enjoy him and he’d be fine.