“Mommy, what does f*** mean?”
I heart Dooce. She’s eloquent, funny, and uh, let’s say brain chemistry-challenged. She’s not the exact same flavor of crazy as I am, but it’s close enough for me to identify with, sometimes to the point of tears. I’m not much of a kid fan, but I enjoy reading her blog. It mildly irritates me that she’s been summarily classified as a “mommy blogger.” Her daughter Leta is obviously the center of her universe, and the source of a lot of her funny anecdotes, but it’s equally obvious that’s not the only thing the site or its creator is about.
(Must… resist… urge to go off on a tirade about women being stereotyped by one important aspect of their lives… argh…)
Urge resisted. ANYway.
I just read her post from Tuesday. She and her husband were having a difference of opinion about how to mentor Leta on proper English usage, because said child was repeatedly using bad grammar (”Did you sawl it?”) to demand Daddy’s assistance in locating a Polly Pocket shoe smaller than a BB. The following paragraph inexplicably cracked me up.
“Leta,” he says with a calm, assertive tone that The Dog Whisperer recommends you use with disobedient dogs. Except Jon has never used this tone with Coco and instead prefers the DIE! DIE! DIE! approach to conversation. It involves a lot of tearing at his hair. And using inappropriate words in front of our impressionable four-year-old daughter who just yesterday used SHIT in proper context. I should probably add an OOPS to the end of that revelation, but I’m less embarrassed by her cussing than I am proud that she is figuring out the subtleties of language.
It wasn’t sure WHY THAT WAS SO HILARIOUS, then I remembered something that happened when I was in first grade. I was only five years old, but I still recall this semi-clearly, because my parents were acting very strange. Or so I thought, at the time.
I had seen a word that I didn’t know written on the bathroom wall. Upon getting home from school, I got the dictionary down and tried to look it up, as I had been trained to do as soon as I learned how to read. If I didn’t know what something meant, there was no point in asking my parents. “Don’t ask me,” my mother and/or father would say, “look it up yourself, unless you can’t figure out how to spell it.”
The word wasn’t IN the dictionary. And it was a little short word. F-U-C-K. So I went and asked for help. “Mommy, what does ‘fuck’ mean?”
All hell broke loose.
“WHERE DID YOU HEAR THAT WORD?!?”
“I didn’t hear it. It was on the bathroom wall. What does it mean?”
“DON’T EVER SAY THAT WORD AGAIN!!”
“Okay. But what does it mean?”
Mommy promptly called Daddy at work to have a fit about what HIS daughter just said. Looking back, Daddy must have had a fit too, and sworn he’d never said THAT in front of his precious baby girl. (Not after he wound up in the doghouse for I have no idea how long, for accidentally teaching me to scream “OHHHHH, SHIT!” at the top of my lungs any time I hurt myself. That’s what he did if he cut himself shaving, so I thought that was what you were SUPPOSED to do if you were bleeding and/or extremely angry. I was rather tomboyish, and was constantly getting cut, scratched, scraping my knees or elbows, or just pissed off while playing and/or roughhousing, so for a few days I yelled “OH SHIT!” a lot until it stopped being amusing, and it was sternly explained to me that only grown-ups were allowed to say that.)
After the hysterical phone call, Daddy apparently started racing home from work. Mommy, who was president of the PTA at the time, apparently called the principal of the school and started screeching at him or her. About the janitor. Or something. I had been told to sit down, shut up, and not move … on the GOOD sofa, in the living room, which I was not normally allowed to touch with my grubby little kid hands, or even breathe on, unless I was freshly bathed, coiffed, and wearing a foo-foo party dress for a holiday photograph, much less SIT on it after school, with playground dust staining the drooping lace ruffles on my socks.
After Daddy got home, the drama seemed to last for hours… my parents having a collective fit, while I sat fidgeting on the sofa… the same crap OVER and OVER…
Both: “THAT’S A VERY BAD WORD! NEVER SAY IT AGAIN!”
Me: “OKAY. I only said it ONCE, to ask what it means. I won’t say it, again, I promise. But WHAT DOES IT MEAN?”
Mommy: “Where did you hear that? Aiee!!! What is this world coming to? What’s wrong with that school?”
Daddy: “Dammit, Cory, YOU’RE the president of the PTA!”
Mommy: “Don’t curse in front of her!”
Me, wailing with frustration: “But WHAT does it MEEEEEEEAN?” (start from beginning)
I imagine the reason they were having such a spaz attack is because even though I calmly accepted the fact that it was a “grown-up only” word that I wasn’t allowed to say, I simply wouldn’t stop asking what it meant, and they didn’t want to tell me right then. I found out what THAT WORD meant around age 12, and never mentioned it to my parents.
After I moved out at 20, I recalled the incident, asked my mother about it, and she started laughing. She had hoped I would forget about it, but wasn’t surprised I remembered. She told me that she and my father had put a lot of effort into training me to want to learn new things, and to think for myself, but they had no idea it would bite them on the ass before I made it through my first year of elementary school.