Friday, July 15, 2011

Do as I 'say' not as I..ahem..err..'say'

Ok, I confess. I have a potty-mouth. I should have my mouth washed out with dish washing liquid; but I do swear. And swear a lot.

I never used to swear. Educated in a Catholic convent, a dropping the word ‘damn’ earned you a double detention in the hot tropical sun with a the placard around your neck saying; ‘I will not take the Lord’s name in vain’.

I didn’t even swear much in high school. I was in too much culture shock from having moved from my convent in to state run, rough and tumble school in the outer suburbs of Melbourne to say much really. I used to hide in the library and wished I could disappear.

But something happened in University. I hooked up a with bunch of country girls (love my peeps!) who could swill beer faster than they could set a sailor to blush with their vocabulary. And somewhere between attending B&S balls with these girls and earning my undergraduate degree, I learned how to swear.

Not that things got much better when I got into my professional career. Working in a technical environment, I had to learn to “keep up” with the lads and swear. They didn’t take me seriously if I could not. And, then I went onto work in multimedia – holy moly – that was when the fun really started!

So, when our son was born – my husband and I made a concerted effort to curb the excesses of our language. The odd f-bomb and sh*t would be dropped when he was an infant, and then  after a while we got lax and just went back to our potty mouth ways.

Until the f-bomb fell out the petal soft lips of our boy. My husband and I stood there in awe as he said, ‘Mummy, the f***ing phone won’t work.  Do you think we should call the d*ckheads at T**tra?’

And so, began the long process of deprogramming my son’s language. The F-bomb became a fart and so on. At the rate he was going, my son was facing expulsion from Kindy!

Anyway after months of “de-programming”, I put my son to bed last night and wondered into the kitchen to make myself dinner. As I was riffling through the contents of my pantry looking for the salsa (and why does it always disappear?) a can of tuna fell on my barefoot from a considerable height.

Confident my son was sound asleep, I hopped around the kitchen with my eyes squeezed shut holding my foot in pain saying words that would make a Hell’s Angel squirm. I finally leaned against the walls and opened my eyes. And there was my son, looking at me, gobsmacked.

“Did you hear all that?” I asked him innocently.

“Yup”, my son said from around the dummy he sucks on much like a cigarette. He is able to speak without the plastic plug falling out. He's even able to shout!

“You know that is naughty to say those words, right?”

“Yup”

“Good, so you won’t say them?”

“You're shittin' me right?" he asked, a perfect imitation of me.

Guess, it's back to the de-programming again. Sigh.

1 comment:

Paisley said...

maybe instead of de-programming you could consider some extra lines of code (to continue the software metaphor) to let him know when (or in-front-of-whom) it's ok to say those things.
Just a thought.

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