It's Christmas 2010. Susannah and I, we're cruising the aisles of a mall parking lot that, while not packed, is crowded for this holiday season. We have been taking turns picking songs on the iPod: she going with some of her standards (Green Day's "Know Your Enemy," Ben Folds' "Trusted," a Party Ben mash-up of "Chasing Cars" and "Every Breath You Take" called "Every Car You Chase"); me, I'm sticking close to the predictable holiday playlist, which she has little patience for. So it's no surprise that during The Blind Boys of Alabama's "I Pray On Christmas" that she chimes from the seat behind me:
"Jesus Crice!"
My approach with Susannah is different, because Susannah's personality is different: she's less likely to seize upon a "forbidden word" and use it to her advantage in the future. She's more interested in pleasing grown-ups, in following the rules. So after I pass through a short period of "detached bemusement," as if I just overheard some other father's 4-year-old take the Lord's name in vain, I give a slow internal count to five and I respond to her cuss thusly:
"Is anything wrong, sweetie?"
Are we ever going to find a parking space?" she exclaims. "We've been looking for an hour!"
No point in changing the focus to her extremely warped perception of time right now. After I pull into a spot and collect all my Christmas lists together, I purposely don't open her door.
"Sweetie, you probably shouldn't say 'Jesus Christ' like you said it."
"Why not?"
"Well, it's a bad thing to say that way. Kind of like the 'B' word."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
Oh, right: the "B" word. You don't know about that. See, that was the first "naughty" word the girls learned about, courtesy their former-grade-school-teaching grandma. Grace could not stand to hear her first-graders say that something was "boring" or that they themselves were "bored." She taught her students, and later her older grandchildren, never to say these words in her presence, and she continued the tradition with ours. "Only boring people are bored," she says. Peach and the Bean have picked right up on this: on those moments when the words escaped their parents' lips, before we'd learned the new regimen, we would get that gasp and those big eyes that only a child can master, sometimes accompanied by an "I'm telling Grandma!" (Laura and I were thrilled when we found a shirt at The Gap with "Only boring people are bored" emblazoned across the front. Zuzu wears it with great pride.)
At some point late in Laura's pregnancy with Piper, it occurred to me, as it occurs to so many new fathers sooner or later, that I was going to have to severely limit—or, ideally, eliminate—swearing around the house. I liked that I had some time to get used to it, that it would be months before I had to watch what I said. Laura would regularly remind me when I let a four-letter word fly that I was going to have to curtail that. I think she thought it would be hard for me. I think I thought the same thing.
As it turns out, dropping the cuss words from my everyday vocab was easy as pie. Something about being around the innocence of a child brings out the inner Mister Rogers. If you have a heart, anyway. I mean, I wouldn't imagine that Deadwood's Al Swearengen (can't spell his name without "swear!") would mind his mouth in the presence of preschoolers. But I had no problem assuming two identities: I was the sweet-voiced father from sunrise until the kiddies were tucked in ... and then, while they dreamed their innocent kiddie dreams, I became the foul-mouthed oaf on the couch, cursing Ryan Murphy's pissing away of perfectly respectable premises on American Horror Story with his over-the-top hogwash. (For example.)
The duplicity was frighteningly easy. Sure, there were times I slipped up—like the time that Piper shoved a twig deep into the lock of our back door, the only door into our house for which I had a key. The girls got the "full monty" of my secret lexicon that afternoon. But my tongue was clean a good 92.6 percent of the time.
Piper, the oldest, was the first, to learn that there was a different 'B' word that the rest of the world used. This was followed closely by introductions to the "D" word and the "S" word, courtesy some male classmates. It's a pity she ever had to come in contact with other kids her age. But she maintained a good, healthy fear of the words and didn't try to ever use them. As parents, we continued to "protect" the girls' innocence as best we could, carefully choosing media with both appropriate themes and language. (Word of warning: I don't care what commonsensemedia.org says, Back to the Future is decidedly NOT a family movie! At least not for kids 6 and 9 years old. I had not remembered Michael J. Fox's potty mouth!) But Piper is in 5th grade now, and she is coming to realize that adult language is a natural part of the world. She is currently obsessing over the soundtrack to Eastland, Lookingglass Theatre Company's recent production of the 1915 Chicago River boat disaster. It was the first Lookingglass production she saw, and she fell hard for the play, the company, and the story of the Eastland. The musical's lyrics are filled with "shit" and "piss" and "goddamn," and she has handled it all with great maturity. We talked in the car one night about how the language is used for purpose in the play, to establish qualities of characters and to heighten the stress of the situation, when people naturally reach for words that match the emotions they're feeling at that moment.
Still, it's strange to think that these words are going to be part of my daughters' everyday lives soon. I think they are learning the proper respect, the proper "place" for it. And that's really the best we can hope for, under the circumstances.
But part of me still wants to beg: can't we just freeze them at this simple age?
I mean, Jesus Crice.
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