Watch Your Mouth!

One day when my oldest son was a wee little 2 1/2 years old, we were out for a drive. He was securely fastened in his car seat, sucking contentedly on his pacifier and rubbing his “blankie” between his fingers the way he did when he was sleepy, happy and totally relaxed. I was driving along making mental notes about what needed to be done before friends and family gathered to celebrate the upcoming fourth of July party at my house. Things were pretty peaceful as we made our way home with Raffi singing softly in the background about Baby Beluga.

Suddenly I hit a speed bump a little too fast and we both flew up off our seats as the car bounced us around for a second or two. No big deal really, but my son pulled the pacifier out of his mouth and shouted “Jesus Christ!” in the exact same tone of voice you might expect to hear from a startled 45 year-old in the same situation. I was feeling more than a little bit shocked as I peered into the mirror at my sweet little toddler with the chubby legs clutching the well worn blanket in one hand and his “Nuk” in the other. “Uh oh.” I thought. “THAT didn’t sound too good.”

A couple weeks later I was confessing all to my sister-in-law. As she took in the story about my son’s potty mouth her eyes widened and she told me that she had a story of her own. Just the other day her daughter, roughly the same age as my son, had shouted out “Damn it!” when her sippy cup fell off the tray of her high chair.

For a second or two we had a good laugh about our naughty little children. But then we had the same sinking thought — they had learned these words from us and we needed to clean up our acts (and our mouths) if we wanted our kids to stand a reasonable chance of being invited to birthday parties and playdates at some point in their lives. Somehow, we reasoned, toddlers who swore like sailors were not likely to be the most popular guests in other people’s homes, regardless of how comical and innocent these stories seemed at the moment. What is funny or cute at two quickly becomes questionable or even offensive a year or two later, and by then the die has been cast.

So that was when I made some changes in the vocabulary part of my life and before I knew what had hit me I noticed a slew of ridiculous words and phrases creeping into my everyday speech. When I tripped and dropped a plate of spaghetti on the way to the table, for example, you might have heard me scream something inane like “SU…gar in the morning”  or “FU…dgesicle” or the really odd “DANG diddly darn it!” instead of those other words that start with the same sounds. True, there is something immensely satisfying about using the SH or FU sounds when you’re really ticked off. But since I now had an attentive audience hanging on my every word, I had to figure out a way to scratch that itch without training my kid to be a mini version of an uncensored Chris Rock doing stand-up.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t swear that much or that often but when you’ve got a little kid around it doesn’t take much to do the trick. They are listening and taking mental notes of their own and love nothing more than imitating the master, whatever he or she may be doing. They certainly do pick things up FAST, as any parent knows.

To this day I still have the habit of shouting out those strange and silly home-made expletives when the SH…erbet hits the fan. And guess what? Even though my kids would never cop to it, I’ve heard those same words fly out of their mouths, too, on occasion. Funny how that works.