It's amazing how easy it is to go many months without writing anything. So many times I've meant to sit down and write something, but something else manages to bump writing from the priority list. My blog has become like so many other things in my life, abandoned half way through. I've never been known for consistency. At anything. (Though I am consistent about shooting myself in the foot, but more on that in another post). On to more pressing matters.
My daughter has finally learned what the "f" word is. Seven years. We had a nice run. Well, that ship has fucking sailed.
A few weeks ago, Samantha said to my wife, "I think I know what the "f" word is." "Okay," replied my wife. "What do you think it is?" Sam looked at me, the crept over to my wife, cupped her hand and whispered something in her ear. "Yup," my wife said. "That's it."
We're not a big swearing household. There are no older sisters, most of the TV shows we watch are on the food network, with everything naughty bleeped out. Don't get me wrong, I can curse with best of them. Trust me, just do something that I think threatens or endangers my child and I will make a crab fisherman blush. But I keep that in check when I'm with my child or any other child for that matter. So I'm not surprised it took her a while to find out what this word is.
You'd think it would be a great revelation, based on the length of time Sam has been badgering us as to what this mysterious word could be. Surely it must be so magical, that once uttered, the earth will shake, mountains will move and every fairy and unicorn will weep once the foul and forbidden sound waves crash through their pristine eardrums. But she just smiled, kind of satisfied, yet another item to tick off her bucket list (or fuck it list like we call it now. no we don't. relax). So we had to inquire, "how did you learn it?" "From one of my classmates." Just as we thought. "Really. What happened?" "Well," she said, "Gemma and I were the office monitors, so it's our job to take papers to and from the office, and when someone's bad, we have to take them to the principal's office." "Oh," I said. "So someone said it and you had to take them to the principal's office?" "No, " she told me. "Frank (not his real name) said it to us when we were taking him to the office for misbehaving." Nice. Then we talk more about the demands and responsibilities of being an office monitor and after a while it's time to play Legos.
So a few days pass, maybe a week. Long enough to completely forget about the whole sordid business. I'm in the kitchen cooking dinner, when I drop a chef's knife. Luckily it didn't land point down on my bare feet. But I did shout 'whoa' or something else G rated, loud enough for Sam to come running in asking, 'what happened?" "Well, Daddy dropped a knife and it almost hit his foot." "Oh," she said, "that would have been bad." "Yes," I told her. "I probably would have screamed a lot louder." "Yeah," she agreed, "and you probably would have said, 'fuck you, knife.'"
Now, it's very hard, almost impossible to express tone or emphasis in text or email. There isn't a font for sarcasm, (I'm working hard to invent one but that will be another post) I'm sure they're some kind of emoticon or colon backslash ampersand combo that the kids are already using, but I never know what the kids are doing these days. But try to understand that this phrase, 'fuck you knife' and the gentle, casual, almost sweet offhand intonation has become a catchphrase with my wife and I (while our kid is not around, relax). There was no anger, no malice in the way she said it. But this was also the first time that I had heard the 'f' word come out of my child. So I was non-plussed to say the least. (look it up, I'm using it correctly).
I try to express in a calm yet concerned but not-too-angry proper parent voice how that is not a word we use in this house (while you are awake or within a fifty foot radius). She instantly starts crying and runs to her room. I go to check on her, and she's sitting in the dark in her room, holding her blanket. I try to tell her that I'm not mad and I know she didn't mean it and I'm not sending her to her room, she's free to come down and we can talk about it. But she tells me she just needs to be alone and cry for a little bit. Okay, come down when you're ready.
And downstairs, my wife and I are literally clamping our hands over our mouths to keep from laughing. Not at our daughter of course what awful inhuman parent would ever do that? but just the casually flippant way she used it. As I'm reading this, I'm really not communicating the humor in this. She might as well have been saying, "good morning, knife" or "looking good, knife." It's truly one of those, 'you had to be there' moments. And she did recover a few minutes later and she hasn't used the word since. Not around us, anyway. We'll see what teacher parent conferences bring.
