Hello my lovely readers! This week I am going to teach you about cussing. You clicked on the post, so you must be preparing to: a) judge me or b) learn from me. 🙂
I am a modern mom with a few gold standards. For instance, I was cool with my kids saying “darn it” and “dang it” and never corrected Russell when he named his stuffed green rabbit “Slutty.” (It was a completely phonetic choice and really fun for me to watch him tell visitors the name of his bunny.) Here are a few of the gold standards my kids came away with: 1) never, ever eat bologna, 2) advertising is sometimes false, 3) be kind to everyone, even if they aren’t kind to you, 4) never say “stupid” or “shut-up.” That’s right, the two words that were off the table in our home were “stupid” and “shut-up.” My own mom never allowed those words in our house and when I became a mom, I had this ingrained sense that those were two really ungodly words that a child should never be allowed to say.
I don’t know about you but I loooooonged to cuss when I was a kid. I would stand in front of my bedroom mirror and practice saying “shit” or “dammit” in all kinds of ways. I would try throwing it out there all casual like, in the course of a regular sentence like it was no big deal. Then I would try spitting those words out in anger, like a loaded threat, which looked waaaaaayyyy cooler. I never even considered uttering “stupid” or “shut up” into the mirror because those were two words I just was NOT going to be saying. I mean, I had my standards.
So I passed those highly righteous standards onto my littles but just like their Mama, they too longed to cuss. One day, I was driving around with Ivy (3) and Russell (5) and Ivy was making up a song in the back seat. This was normal behavior for her as she was always playing a part in some musical known only to her, so I wasn’t paying close attention. After a minute or two, she amp’d up her volume and I could hear more clearly what she was singing. Her song went like this, “We don’t say stuuuuuupiiiiiid, we don’t say shuuuuuut uuuuuuuup…” What?! She was incorporating our “never-say-these-words” words into a song about not being able to say them and thereby making a safe way for herself to say them. She was a veritable genius. I couldn’t even reprimand her because her song upheld our standard of which words were off limits.
She sang it again and again and again and Russell was watching me to see what I was going to do. He was smiling really big and likely feeling jealous of the fact that Ivy was getting away with trying out our off-limits words. I tried to hide my giggles but I knew I needed to weigh in somehow, so I said, “That’s right Ivy, we DON’T say those words. Do you have any other songs for us today?” She moved onto some new tune about how bunnies don’t like computers and I crossed my fingers that she wouldn’t work our family’s most famous bunny into this new little ditty.
Some of the gold standards that we pass down to our kids are straight up ridiculous. We expend so much energy trying to impart weird principles without even realizing they are weird. How did I grow up believing that it was waaaaaay worse to say “stupid” and “shut-up” than “shit” or “dammit?” This many years later, my family thinks that cuss words are hysterical. I now regularly challenge my kids (and myself) to think of more intelligent things to say than a typical cuss word would communicate. It’s lazy man’s talk, really. Simply not worth the breath. Handy for when you have accidentally hammered your thumb or pulled out into oncoming traffic but generally not helpful. And as for “stupid” and “shut-up”, we only allow ourselves to SING those words, in the very same song Ivy wrote to condemn them.
PS Last week’s post was late coming out because I was in the Canadian woods and could not get the wifi to accommodate my posting schedule. If you missed it, check it out. I had my mom, Sharleen Thornberry, the original Gypsythugmom, in for a visit. She is the beloved star of the “How To Do Hard Things” blog. She gave us an update on her recovery from her double mastectomy and told a hysterical story to boot. You will love it!
PPS I am going to trim my posts down to one a month as I will be busy working on putting “Hello My Lovely Readers” together in book form for you. I will also be starting research on a book on the same subject as the blog post “Quit Telling Your Kids They Can’t Sing.” If you are a singer, beginner or novice, and would like to participate in my research, please send me an email at gypsythugmom@gmail.com. If you have already emailed me to tell me you want to participate, look to hear from me this month.
