Gosh Darn Melon Farmers!

The ubiquitous anecdote –

I was at the park with a friend and his son.  His son took a fall of some kind.  I rushed over to him.

“Are you ok”, I asked?

“Fuhmeechansaw!”

“Huh?”

Being just two years old, he could be hard to understand.

“Fuhmeechansaw!”

His Dad was right on my heels.

“Fuhmeechansaw!”

“What’s he saying”, I asked?

His Dad looked at little embarrassed.

“Uh...nothing.  Nothing really.”

“Come on”, I urged.

“He...uh...he’s saying...ummm...’Fuck me with a chain saw.  He got it from me, I’m afraid.

Kids say the darndest things.

One of the weirdest parts of parenting, not that the whole thing isn’t, for lack of a better word, fucked up, is watching your speech.  From age 15 to 29, my words were my own.  I was free to swear, curse and cuss as much or as little as I cared to and fuck off, if you didn’t like it.  Swearing became second nature and though you may register it in other people’s speech, it can be difficult to hear it in your own.

There’s a social component to cussing.  Of course, you don’t want to cuss around those who do not appreciate it.  “Fuck you, Grandma, get your own tea”, would just not fly.  Nor would “Forty Hail Mary’s?  Why are you being such an asshole, Father?”  These social cues are easy to integrate for the most part because they happen outside of the home.  You tend to be a little more aware, or at least I do, when your profanity might offend people you’ve never met.

But then, the kid comes.

I remember being stunned when I realized that, although non-verbal, my daughter understood almost everything I was saying.  I had labored under the notion that speech and comprehension were somehow linked; that in order to understand something, you had to be able to repeat it yourself.

Emma was 6 months when we were hanging out at home and I said, “Ok, let’s go into your room”, and she lead the way doing her little G. I. Joe crawl.  She had processed what I said.  She knew what a “room” was.  She knew that “go” meant moving.  Oddest of all, she knew which room was hers.  She knew the layout of her surroundings and how to navigate them.  And she’d learned them by listening and observing.  “Your room” was a different place (or concept) than “Mommy and Daddy’s Room”.

But, since she couldn’t say “my room”, I’d assumed that she didn’t know what it meant.  She was like the Indian in “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”.  I interpreted her lack of speech as lack of comprehension.

Gradually, of course, she started speaking and became “human”.  The words came choppily at first, but soon she was talking in sentences.

She was walking through the kitchen with her baba (bottle, for non-parents) when she dropped it.

“Shit!”, she exclaimed.

“What?”

“Shit!”

Uh-oh!

After the initial shock wore off, I must admit that I was impressed.  Yes, she’d sworn, but she’d sworn in context, rather then just spouting cuss words randomly.  This was, glass-half-full-wise, something to be proud of.  My child was not an animatron just parroting back whatever she heard.  She listened, absorbed and repeated in context.

The first reaction to hearing your child swear is laughter.  Face it.  There’s something adorable about hearing a two-year old say “shit”.  Think Bad-News Bears.

When the laughter stops, though, you come face-to-face with who you are and what “good parent” and “good person” mean.  You realize that you, despite your best efforts, have become a role model.  Your behavior is the primary template that your child will base his or her life on.  Your habits will become their habits.  Your words will become their words.  Your reactions feed how they view the world.

Your “shit” is their “shit”.

Debating “good words” and “bad words” is old hat and a waste of time.  George Carlin has already done that Lenny Bruce bit.  There are societal norms that, as a parent, I’m duty bound to uphold.  A kid swearing is one of them.  The harder trick is explaining to a child why certain words that spew forth unceremoniously from Mommy and Daddy from time to time are not ok for them to say, even if they’re warranted.

Emma, when she was in first grade, pulled me aside one day.

“Daddy,” she said in a serious tone, “is Fuck a bad word?”

There are times that you really wish every thing your child said were taped.  The way she said, “fuck” was memorable.  She knew it was a bad word.  She, in some ways, just wanted to say it and see my reaction.  She held the F a little long and the K crackled from her tongue.

“Bad?  I personally don’t think that any word is bad.  There’s a lot of people that do, though, and they’d consider it a bad word.”

“Somebody got in trouble saying,[long pause] “fuck” at school.”

“Yup.  That’ll do it.  The thing is it’s not a word a kid should say.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s just not appropriate.  There’s something’s that are ok for kids to do and things that adults can do.  Like, your bunny.  If I walked down the hall at school sucking my thumb and holding your bunny, would that be ok?”

She laughed a little, but the answer was serious.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re too old!  Grown-ups don’t do that!”

“It’s the same thing with a kid saying ”fuck”...”

I paused.  I’d debated whether or not to say it out loud to her.  There was some vague notion in my head that saying it out loud might have done more harm than good.  But I know she heard me say it before and if I avoided using it, it would reinforce that it was a bad word.

“A kid in elementary school is too young to say it.”

She paused and thought about it.

I haven’t heard “fuck” out of her since.