Inappropriate, Appropriate Language and Appropriate, Inappropriate Language (or Teaching Your Kids to Swear)

This will be a familiar scene to many moms. You find yourself in the car with your husband. You are showered and wearing your best underwear and your grown-up shoes (which your husband lovingly refers to as your "bitch boots"). This can mean only one thing, you and your husband are ready for a night out, ALONE. The kids are the farthest thing from your mind. And because it is so damn relaxing just to be in the company of another adult, you aren’t even really talking, you are just quietly taking in the scenery. Until something catches your eye, something you are always on the look out for -maybe its a cow, or a train, or an ambulance, or a silly costumed adult selling something- but you are so prone to searching out this thing that you notice it immediately and can’t help but to exclaim in your best mommy voice, "Look honey, there’s a cow! (or a train, or an ambulance, or a firetruck, or whatever commonplace thing it is that your husband doesn’t give a hoot about). And there you have it, no matter how grown up you look, and how far away the kids are, its pretty hard to put away your mommy personality.

This tendency can present itself in other facets of your life and result in varying degrees of embarrassment. You can imagine how uncomfortable it would be to tell your a friend, or a friend’s husband to "say please" when ordering at a restaurant, or to find yourself kneeling down attempting to tie another adult’s shoe, or to accidentally follow a friend into the stall in the bathroom… Most often for me though, I find the mommy version of me appears quite often when I am a little bit stressed or frustrated and a good-old fashioned "cuss word" would be just the thing to express it. Except that for some reason I don’t swear. Instead I find myself declaring things like "Oh Crime!" and "Farmer!" and "Shimey Show!" Phrases that are so ridiculous, I don’t even know how to spell them. The other day I spilled a good bit of dinner on the floor while making it. There were no children within earshot. And my immediate reaction to the spill was to stomp my foot and yell "Shimey Show" (which I think means Shit! but I am not really sure). Now think about what would have happened if I did that when I was out. I mean out with drivers-licensed , college educated and yes, employed people. I would look like a real ass and all my pretensions of interesting adultness would be shattered. And trust me, nothing blows your adult-not-a-mommy cover faster than dropping your family’s own rated-g version of the f-bomb in adult only company.

Don’t let me mislead you though, as my husband (and children) can attest to, the problem with me and my inappropriate language is that I can’t seem to get the censoring at the appropriate moment thing down. So for every time I’ve slipped and said "Oh, farm her!" (which my kids would interpret as oh! farmer!) when discussing something with another adult., there have been at least five or six times where I just let go and used the standard language in front of my children (and whatever other children happened to be in the room at the time).

You can imagine this must be very confusing for my kids. Which is worse Farm or Fuck? What exactly does "Shimey Show" mean and how can it mean "I left my wallet in the car" and "I forgot to pick up your sister?" at the same time. I have a good friend who frankly talks like a pirate in front of her kids. And they are quite familiar and even adept with the correct applications of all of the less savory words. She doesn’t feel guilty about this at all. And I don’t think she should. As she has pointed out, if the worst thing her kids do is say fuck every now and again, than she will have done a damn good job of raising her children. And she’s right.

This had made me wonder however, if I have done my kids some sort of disservice by wavering between my own personal swear words (the use of which will only bring them ridicule in the adult world) and the real deal (which we agree can not really offend their tender ears all that much). Fortunately my four year old son put a stop to all my worrying the other day. He and his sister, who is seven, were eagerly watching the snow fall and discussing the notion of a "snow day". Because Xavier is only in his second year of school, he is just beginning to really grasp the delicious freedom of a snow day which I think is obvious from what I heard him declare to his sister - "If there was no school tomorrow so there was too much snow, that would be fuckin’ weird!" And he was right, snow days aren’t just weird, they are fuckin’ weird. And in that moment I knew that my kids would never, ever innocently utter Farm! or Crime! in frustration. Instead they would say what they really meant (and conjugate it).