I was born first of a set of identical twins.  My parents were expecting a large boy and I was  a girl.  The afterbirth didn’t come out.  Instead my sister, Pam, did.  We just happened to be born on our parents’ thirteenth wedding anniversary.

When Pam and I started talking, we had our own language.  The adults around us watched our vivacious conversations and wondered what we were saying.

Pam started talking normally and I never made that transition.  Most people couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make the effort to understand me.

The attempts to fix my voice included: tonsillectomy, cutting the filament under my tongue (if I was tongue-tied), lots of speech therapy.  None of these helped.

After I graduated from high school, Mom drove me through the summer to Pittsburgh to the cleft palate clinic where I went through a series of tests: an x-ray movie of my talking, a tortuous appliance that attached to my upper palate and extended into my throat.  Right before the start of my freshman year of college, the doctors determined that I had a hidden cleft palate which could be fixed with a pharyngeal flap.

The operation was scheduled for the following summer.  I would have loved to start my college freshman year with a voice that sounded “normal.”  But not to be…