Free Growing Girls by Jeanne Marie Laskas

for Anna so much as my exalted sense of language. I spend my days with words, putting my thoughts into written form. Giving language to my thoughts is the only way I even know what my thoughts are. Anyone knows that words are what separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Surely language is where people
begin
being people.
    This, anyway, is the indoctrination. This is the assumption you walk around with, having been schooled on the principle of words as the building blocks of communication. True enough. But what about the stuff underneath the building blocks? The rocks and the dirt and the mud of emotion? Like all babies, Anna laughed long before she spoke; she laughed in my arms the first day I held her. Jokes are funny in Chinese andin Arabic and in French and in Infant-ese. A bassoon can tell a joke and so can a flute and a cat can do something very, very funny. But among creatures, only people can laugh. Laughter, I think, is where people begin being people.
    I wanted Sasha to have a breakthrough just as Anna had had with the alphabet. Lisa started coming to our house in May of that year, when Sasha was twenty-six months old, and she tested Sasha every which way. Sasha proved to be on target for cognitive development as well as fine-motor development, while ahead of the game, testing at the level of a twenty-nine-month-old, for gross-motor skills.
Today Sasha was observed to throw a ball at least three feet and walked along a line of tape on the floor. Sasha can do a somersault with ease
.
    Language acquisition in children is divided into two components: receptive, meaning the words the child comprehends, and expressive, the words she can actually say. Sasha scored on target for receptive.
She is beginning to respond to basic prepositions such as “in,” “out,” “on.” Sasha also can identify several body parts and will point to pictures in a book when asked
. But her expressive-language development was placed at a paltry fourteen months. She was a toddler with the communication skills of an infant.
    There was one line in Lisa’s report that none of us made a big enough deal of at the time:
Sasha tends to point and use gestures creatively to express her wants/needs
.
    Creatively.
    In Aruba there was a playground on the beach near the little coconut-tree hut and my girls were playing and so were two older girls, maybe eight and ten, both with long blondehair. Anna was busy smushing wet sand through her toes and fingers and then painting her legs with “A,” “B,” and “C” and then making designs on her cheeks like war paint. Anna has always been this way. She can entertain herself with a stone and a feather.
    Sasha was watching the blonde-haired girls. At first I thought it was their acrobatics that caught her attention. The older girls had mastered the swinging bridge made of hanging tires and soon enough they took to leaping off it and then diving into somersaults in the sand. Sasha watched and watched with those eyes that held so much, those eyes that held so much in China when she was in my arms for the first time, a frozen little girl with a bald head and arms curled into her chest in fear. And now here she was a nineteen-pound peanut in a pink bikini.
    In one swift motion, Sasha picked up a shell and walked over to the smaller of the two girls. She offered the shell to the girl. “Oh, thank you,” the girl said, taking it. And so Sasha picked up another shell and offered it to the other girl, who likewise took it.
    “Aw, she’s so cute!” said one to the other.
    Sasha did not smile. Instead, she held out her hands and demanded both shells back.
    The girls obliged, giggling.
    All three stood there for a moment.
    “Iss!” Sasha said, looking at the shells. Then she dropped them, one in front of each girl. She pointed to the ground. Iss!
    “She-is-so-cute!” the taller girl said to the other, bothseeming to instinctively understand the order to bend down and pick up the shells. And so