When my son was having a hard time learning to speak, I used to wonder if part of the problem was that I was so good at reading his mind. We would be playing, and he would start to cry, and out of nowhere, I would think, "he wants different shoes" or "he wants that toy that's buried on the top shelf of his closet that he hasn't played with in three months" or "he wants to go to the convenience store." And somehow, I was always right.

Now that he is six, I know my mind reading was a response to the problem, not the cause of it. It is harder to guess what he is thinking these days; not only are his experiences and inner life getting more complex as he gets older, he is also in school and therapy without me for nearly 7 hours a day, so there are lots of experiences he has that I'm no longer part of. But he still has problems communicating: he will freeze and won't be able to think of, or at least to say, certain words. It's like a wall goes up in his mind, he just can't get the words to come out. We use techniques our speech therapist recommended to us to try to get around the block, to try to get at the words in a different way. And we often end up playing long frustrating games of 20 (or 30 or 40) questions, trying to get him to describe what he's talking about, before we (and he) can figure out what it is he wants to say.

A few weeks ago, he came to me and said, "I need something." And when I asked him what it was, he replied with, "You tell me, Mama!" I was so immensely proud of both of us when, after minimal frustration on both our parts, I figured out that he needed help buttoning and zipping his pants by asking a series of questions. Is it a person, place, thing or action? Action. Where do we do it? Everywhere (anywhere). What part of our body do we use to do it? Hands. What do our hands do it to? Something on our body. Where on our body is that something? Somewhere around the butt/waist/crotch. Which led me to the open pants hiding under his shirt. Whew!

The night before last a friend of ours came over and made pizzas with the kids. It's always great to get my son to play with food, since he has huge problems with eating. We tried to make his favorite cartoon character on the pizza, but we didn't have ingredients in all of the right colors. (Every detail has to be exactly right, you understand.) So, I was trying to use food coloring to dye some of the ingredients so that he would touch and use them. He didn't like what I had come up with and had an idea of his own, but couldn't figure out how to express it. Eventually, together, we figured out he wanted to use the food coloring itself to paint on the pizza dough, but not before he wailed in frustration, "Mama, tell me what I'm thinking!"

Oh, kiddo, how I wish I could! How I wish I could always read your mind the way I seemed to when you were a toddler. How I wish all the world could. How I wish communication between all people, everywhere, weren't so hard. But all I can do is keep asking questions and waiting for the answers, and all I can hope is that you keep learning to be patient with your mind and with other people who struggle within their own minds to listen.