Use Your Words. (Not mine.)

Credit: triadmomsonmain.com/images/blog/cleantoilet.jpg

As children grow and develop, so grows and develops a parents’ need to examine our use of foul language. This is a slow evolution. Babies don’t give a shit if you swear.  Like puppies and houseplants, they are all about intonation.

But babies don’t stay babies forever. Soon, they become toddlers. And a toddler will repeat anything you say – no matter how softly you thought you whispered it. And the worse the thing you said was, the more times they will repeat it. In front of your husband’s parents. Or the babysitter. Or the neighbor kids who will go home and tell their parents they learned to say, “For fuck’s sake, again with the goddamn Cheerios,” at your house. It is a little-known fact that a toddler’s DNA profile is almost identical to that of an African Grey Parrot.

If you successfully make it through the mimicking phase, you are rewarded with the spelling phase. This offers you free rein to c-u-s-s like a sailor whilst preserving your child’s virgin ears. Beware however, that sometimes the spelling phase can overlap with the mimicking phase. Even if they don’t know what they’re saying, it can be disconcerting (or hilarious), to hear your child spell out, “S-H-I-T!” after she stubs her toe. Note: this phase will end without warning. And it will likely happen like this:

You to your spouse: There is so much C-R-A-P in this house, I want to scream.

Your child: Mommy, you spelled ‘crap.’

You: Oh shit.

After the spelling phase, you’re pretty much at a crossroads. You will have to decide that A.) Your kids are going to hear all the words anyway, so why shelter them – or B.) You are going to try to shelter them. If you choose A, your kids will be the ones who teach the other kids at school the A-word, the D-word, the S-word, the B-word, and even the Mac Daddy of them all, the dreaded F-word. If you choose B, your kids will learn the A-word, the D-word, the S-word, the B-word, and even the Mac Daddy word from his or her classmate whose parents chose option A. Either way, you’re fucking delusional if you think you can keep your kids completely away from swear words.

The way I see it, profanity is a part of our language. And I love language. I wouldn’t say that I am a heavy curser, but I definitely employ the occasional expletive when I think it will help make what I’m saying clearer. Or, more often, funnier. (See Above.) My father taught me from a youngish age that a well-placed curse word can really bring some oomph to your communications, provided you are smart about how you use it and don’t allow it to rob you of your creativity.

My husband, however, is of another ilk. He uses curse words like punctuation. I blame his brother for this, since his brother is the only person I know who swears more than he does. (It was no surprise to anyone when my 3yo nephew dropped his sippy cup at the church pre-school and exclaimed, “goddamnit!”) They, The Brothers Orr, feed off each other, escalating their frequency of expletives until what they’re saying becomes almost an unintelligible mashing together of the letter F and the hard-K sound over and over.

In general however, when my husband is not around his brother, he controls his profanity pretty well. There is one major exception to this rule. When confronted with a backed-up toilet (containing numerals 1 or 2) Jimmy Orr’s cursing-spigot turns on and cannot be turned off until the wealth and breadth of his considerable dirty-word arsenal has been completely exhausted, emptied into the air around him like a semi-automatic weapon at an NRA rally. And it always starts the same way. I won’t burden you with the exact phraseology, but it rhymes with, “Sock trucker, brother shucker, bun of a witch…” and so on and so on and so on. And it happens every single time there is a toilet issue. No matter who last used it (once it was our 3-year-old daughter). Or how many friends the kids have over (this weekend there were 3). Or how many times, I try to talk him down off his filthy-mouthed-ledge (that actually just acts as accelerant). When this happened over the weekend, my 10-year-old’s eyes went as wide as saucers. Then she started laughing. This provided the perfect opportunity to talk about the how and why of using profanity, without things getting too judgey.

I don’t encourage parents to use foul language around their kids in regular communications, but like everything else in this life, moderation seems to be the best course. If you try to ban this language completely, like a profanity prohibition, your kids will just run to the nearest speak-easy (read: any place you’re not) and cuss a blue streak.  Not to mention, you’ll look like a hypocrite the next time you get caught mid road rage rant. Whether we like it or not, our kids don’t stay kids forever, and they are going to hear these words. It might be from you, it might be from their friends, it might be from my husband the next time someone uses too much TP. These words are a part of our language and since we all know the power that language has, its best to teach our kids how to use that power wisely. Or if not wisely, then at the very least, with style.