Me And My Big Mouth

By Tara Cohen
When I was in fourth grade, I already needed braces. Badly. My overbite was pushing beaver-esque proportions (man, I wish I were exaggerating), and the kids at day-camp referred to me not-so-affectionately as “Chipmunk.” The orthodontist was concerned that if I had any kind of accident involving my face, those two disproportionately large front choppers would be history. But, he told us, before he could even start shifting those pearly marbles around, some of them would have to be sacrificed to the tooth fairy in order for the rest to fit properly. “You,” he informed me, “have a very small mouth.” And thus began one of the longest-running jokes in my family’s history. “Tara?? A small mouth? I really don’t think so,” they joked. “The child who speaks at such lengths she seems to take breaths only once every five minutes? The one who, at age 4, told her great-grandmother and every other grey-haired person she met that they were old and surely going to die soon does not have a small mouth. No. This kid hands off wrapped birthday presents and says, ‘It’s a sweater! I hope you like it!’ Surely you’ve mixed her X-rays up with someone else’s. This child has the biggest mouth of all time. Call the folks at that Guinness Book place. They’ll back us up. Seriously. Add some teeth. There’s room. We swear.”

Turns out they were both right. The ortho-sadist knocked me out and pulled four adult and four baby teeth from my disproportionately small jaw, and then, when I woke up, I told anyone and everyone all about it. Considering it was 25 years ago and I’m still talking about it, I’d say my family had a fair point. Considering I’m talking about it with a very straight set of healthy teeth, I gotta give the doc a little credit too.

While surgical extractions and four years of braces did resolve my “small mouth” issue and alleviate my “chipmunk” status, it did nothing to improve my “big mouth” reputation, something I continue to perpetuate even now in my 30s. While I am finally capable of shutting up long enough to let people be pleasantly surprised while opening their gifts, I’ve never quite mastered the art of keeping a strong opinion to myself. As I have no current aspirations to politics or mafia life, I try to think of it as an asset. Being loquacious (sounds better than “more-talkative-than-a-teenage-cheerleader-on-speed”) often leads to interesting conversations with people in the most random settings. Just a few months back I had the most fascinating two-hour chat with this dead-ringer-for-Obama-atheistic-democrat-with-two-goddaughters-and-a-flat-in-Soho on a flight to New York. He was the most fascinating single-serving friend I’ve ever met (If you didn’t catch that little pop-culture reference, go rent “Fight Club,” seriously.), and being unwilling to talk politics or religion, or to talk to strangers in general, would certainly not have led to anywhere near as interesting a flight.

So I can safely say I really do enjoy the benefits of being what my mom used to call a “Chatty Cathy” most of the time. The problem is that my garrulousness is coupled with the chutzpah of a nighttime-subway-riding, over-80-and-never-been-out-of-New-York-City, cabbie-mouthed yenta (go see your nearest Jewish friend if I just lost you). And now that I’m living in 3 A.D. (in my little world that’s “After Diagnosis,” meaning after my son Will was diagnosed with autism), that assertive talkativeness and righteous indignation is coupled with a level of maternal protectiveness generally seen only during safari shows on The Discovery Channel. And this often lands me up on my soapbox, which is where I found myself just last week during one of Will’s many appointments.

With bits of this very article swirling in my head, the miscellaneous vignettes and notes I wanted to use sitting in unfinished-blog-piece-limbo on my iMac, I had one of those break-out-the-soapbox, adrenaline-surging-in-my-tightened-chest-livid, crescent-nail-marks-in-my-palms moments while waiting for Will to finish his occupational therapy session. As my daughter Julia zoomed around the waiting room playing with the institutionally obligatory multi-sided activity cube and occasionally stopping by to grab a cookie, the two college kids working the front desk were bantering playfully while at least pretending to work. I wasn’t even aware that I was hearing their conversation until I heard the girl peal with laughter and say to her male counterpart, “Oh my God! Don’t be such a retard!” In that moment, I had the most visceral reaction. I set down Julia’s cookies and crossed the otherwise-empty waiting room. I stopped at the open privacy window and said, “Are you fucking kidding me? Do you even realize that there are children here who actually ARE retarded? What the hell is the matter with you!?”

Ok, ok. Yes, I do have so much nerve that using it all at once is considered Felony Assault in 37 states and Guam, but no, I didn’t say that. I used my tactful-yet-dissatisfied-customer/super-advocate-mommy voice and told the staffers how disappointed I was that anyone who worked there would use that kind of language. I expressed disbelief that people who work in a place where special-needs children come for treatment would so flippantly make light of the conditions that plague the very people they are there to serve. I was short and to the point (and those of you who know me personally know that’s not exactly my strong suit). I was direct. I was firm. I was my son’s very best advocate. And I was right.

That’s where I find myself quite often these days: I’m going about my business and then suddenly I’m explaining to a paraprofessional why “retard” is actually a four-letter word. And here I have to veer off for just a second (or a few paragraphs) while I type from my virtual soapbox. Aside from using “retard” while annotating music in Latin or discussing ways to “retard the growth” of a fire or tumor, the word “retard” is no better than the foulest racial epithet. Hearing it used elicits a clenched-hands-and-teeth, take-a-deep-breath-before-verbally-spewing, base emotional response from me like almost nothing else.

Granted, being a special-needs parent makes me hyper-aware, but my sensitivity to language is nothing new. I’ve always been both socially aware and unapologetically blunt, and over the years that has translated into my calling people out over using racial slurs or telling bigoted jokes, perpetuating negative religious or other stereotypes, and making sexist comments. I’ve done it because (here’s the thesis you English wonks have been wading through my rant looking for) individual failure to speak out makes us complicit in the continued use of offensive language, and that reinforces the marginalization of minorities, women, and the disabled. In particular, when we turn a deaf ear to the abuse of terms that should be reserved for their true purposes (as opposed to slurs that literally have no appropriate use), we dismiss the suffering of those in need of our compassion and support. That is, when someone jokes that a don’t-let-my-carrots-and-mashed-potatoes-touch child is “a little O.C.D,” it makes light of the debilitating plight of those who live with the disorder.

So, yeah, when I hear people use the word “retard,” it gets to me. And, now that autism is so much more common a diagnosis than retardation, I dread the day I start hearing people say things like, “Dude, don’t be so autistic.” After all, once A.D.D became commonly diagnosed, the term rapidly became a part of our pop-culture lexicon. Even today in our don’t-offend-anyone, overly-PC, super-sensitive-and-all-inclusive society, I regularly hear people say things like, “Don’t mind me, I’m all A.D.D today,” when they mean “frazzled” or “distracted.” So while I haven’t heard “autistic” used as slang yet, I’m pretty sure it’s coming. It’s one of the main reasons I tend to say Will “has autism” as opposed to saying he’s “autistic.” That, and the fact that calling him “autistic” is so limiting and defining, as though autism has him. He is Will first and his autism is a distant second…but I digress. Virtual soapbox stowed.

So. After the kids were in bed the night of my little speech at the clinic, I was seeking a little commiseration and had a video web chat with my dear friend, Ian, who’s known me since my fluorescent-tee-and-too-tight-cutoff-jeans-paired-with-braces-for-my-oh-so-big-yet-too-small-mouth summer camp days and who has an adult brother with autism (If I were anywhere near hip enough to have a tech section to my blog, this is where I would mention how fantastic GMail Chat is, but I’m just not that cool). I told him all about my episode at Will’s therapy clinic, and his response was on par with what I’d expect had the receptionist used some phenomenally offensive racial slur. So when I told him that I’d actually heard him toss out the word “retarded” in two recent conversations, he was truly stunned. He was completely unaware he had even used the word.

Ian’s response surprised me. I had assumed that anyone who grew up with a mentally disabled family member would be as aware as I am of those terms and how offensive they can be. I figured we just differed on our opinions of what constitutes acceptable use. But I was wrong. Well, half wrong. While his hackles rise from hearing others maliciously use terms like “retard,” the unintentional or off-hand misuse of the slightly softer term “retarded,” particularly when not used in relation to someone who actually has disabilities, was something he hadn’t given excessive consideration. From childhood on, even for someone with such compassion for the disabled, the terminology is just that ingrained in our vernacular.

Still unable to shake off my rather justified vexation, I next directed my splenetic rant toward my friend Laura (she of recent Inappropriate Outburst fame). When I finished, she asked me a series of evocative questions: What exactly what it was that bothered me so much about this particular incident? Was it the use of the word “retard”? Would I have felt differently if she had told him not to “be retarded”? Was it the setting? Good questions, I thought. My initial answer was simple: yes. But then, of course, I climbed up on my over-the-phone soapbox (Anyone else wondering how many times I can use “soapbox” in one article? “Dais” and “podium” just sound so stuffy.) and delved into a 45-minute pontification on why it continually astounds me that we allow the plights of those whose struggles are amongst the most difficult to be used as name-calling fodder for the masses.

Now, Laura is passionate about the causes that are dear to her, but she is also incredibly diplomatic and non-confrontational. So even after seven years of friendship, she never fails to be shocked by what she so prudently calls my outspokenness but what, in actuality, is my inability to keep my mouth shut when something seems genuinely wrong to me. True, I’ve developed more of a filter between my mouth and brain since my early days of telling anyone over 50 that they’re two steps from the grave, but my verbal audacity still stuns Laura, and, I have to admit, I get a kick out of it.

After hearing about my 20-second Tolerance Seminar with the front-office staffer, Laura, who shared my outrage, would have been pretty reasonable (as would anyone else)  in assuming that this was the end of the incident. I’d said my piece, and that was that. But, being the talker I am, when I proceeded to tell this story to no fewer than five people in the first three hours after leaving the clinic, not one friend was surprised to hear that after my run-in with the receptionist, I did not stow that ever-so-portable soapbox (that’s seven mentions if you lost count) in my handy-dandy diaper bag. Instead, I gritted my ever-so-straight-in-my-small-mouth teeth and I toted that soapbox (and my daughter) down the hall to the clinic director’s office and climbed right back up.