Right Mothering

The  intersection of practical parenting and the theorizing of human behavior in the recent discussion of teasing makes me think of another useful-to-society, but shameful-to-the-individual act, that of cursing.  I recognize that cursing is eternal and universal (Swearing, The Anatomy of Swearing, Cursing in America: A Psycholinguistic Study of Dirty Language in the Courts, in the Movies, in the Schoolyards and on the Streets, Expletive Deleted: A Good Look at Bad Language), but am repulsed by the printing of English expletives on clothing in non-English-speaking countries and and the free use of these non-English speakers of these same expletives in their everyday speech.  If I ever hear someone curse in front of my daughter, I say something.  I also believe that cursing, like teasing, is best learned in the home.

But I myself curse.  I live in the metropolitan area with the worst drivers in America, where ‘right of way’ has no meaning, but I learned to drive in a place where civility and driving are not mutually exclusive.  My keen sense of justice (inherited by my daughter) makes driving the greatest source of stress in my life.  Cursing enables me to expel that stress at the moment when I encounter the stressor rather than later, when the stressor is absent but not my husband or daughter.

Unfortunately, my daughter is often in the car with me at these critical moments.  My cursing is rather tame – I never go beyond calling the other driver a jackass or idiot.  But my husband doesn’t curse.  Really.  I have never heard him utter a profanity, in any of his multiple languages.  He is more controlled than I am and doesn’t approve of even my PG-rated cursing.

When we visit the local aquarium, I nevertheless blush when my daughter points to the penguins and correctly calls them jackass penguins.  She even knows that a jackass is a donkey.  But in a context conducive to misunderstanding, I, admittedly, squirm when she correctly and inoffensively uses the very same word that I use offensively as a curse word in a bubble without any possibility of misunderstanding.

So, very early on (we didn’t have a car before she was three years old), I explained that jackass is only to be used to call the bad drivers we encounter on the road roads and only in the car as we encounter them.  And, by the grace of God, I have never heard her use the word in any context.  When baby number two arrives, with his or her far-more impressionable mind, I may need to find another outlet for my stress.