CURSED

I grew up in a house with parents who never swore. I can only recall my father saying “shit” once while I was growing up and that was in 1984 when we were stuck in traffic on the way to a Culture Club concert. As for my mother, the closest I ever heard her come to swearing was occasionally hearing her say that someone was on her “S.H. List.” To this day I’m not sure if that was an abbreviation for “Shit Head” or if she was merely spelling out the first two letters of the word shit itself and leaving the rest to the imagination.

I’m obviously from a different generation than my parents, one where cursing doesn’t bare the weight it used to. But it’s still frowned upon when you curse in front of your children. And before Jen and I had kids we cursed a lot - Jen had the mouth of a sailor and every other word out of my mouth used to be either “douche bag” or “assbag.” But once we had children all that began to change.

In the beginning, when you’ve got a little baby you can swear all you want. And even though you do, you start feel bad about it. And you start to notice when other people swear in front of your three month old. But while they’re this little you can still get away with watching the grizzly murders on CSI in the background while you play with them or checking out the latest Judd Apatow dick joke-a-palooza. When Arden was about 16 months old I thought she still fit into this category. That was until I was watching an episode of South Park where they were doing a social commentary on the “n” word. The characters were dropping “n” bombs literally every few seconds. I didn’t even think Arden was paying attention until she dropped her own “n” bomb and from that day forward she’s been on a strict diet of Sesame Street and Spongebob.

But for the most part Arden wasn’t one of those kids who heard their parents curse and then went on a “shit” rampage at church. That’s partially because we no longer swore in front of her and when we occasionally let a curse word slip, we never apologized for it, we just moved on and I think because we took this approach over the “oops” instant retraction method, the word would just fly by Arden and because of its abstract nature it had no meaning to her. But lately she’s beginning to understand what a curse word is. She may not use George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television,” but I do catch her saying “Damn it” when she’s frustrated or “Tartar Sauce” and “Barnacles.” The first one I take responsibility for, the latter two come courtesy of Spongebob.

Lately Jen and I have become a little lax in our verbiage around Arden. Mind you we’re not out-and-out cursing, but rather we’ve just been using the first letter of a given curse word in our daily conversation. For example we might say to each other, “What the F is that all about?” So I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that while we were on vacation this past weekend Jen mentioned to Arden that we might be late for the magic show at the hotel and Arden replied, “Well that F-in’ sucks.” Jen and I just turned to each other and laughed because we had seen the magician the night before and he was really good so it did F-in’ suck.