My sister and the two youngest of her crew of children came and stayed with me last week. I love my sister. She is a sweet and accepting person. She never once commented on my drinking coffee, or the wine bottles that I have elegantly displayed in a rack on my counter, both of which get me a one way ticket to Outer Darkness in her Mormon world. I love that she can be herself and also let me be me, that we can still be sisters even though we disagree about religion, a concept that is ironically foreign to many religious people. However she is raising her children to be Mormon in the strictest sense of the word. This means that around them I have to be pretty careful about everything I do, or rather everything I say, least I offend their fragile sensibilities. They cannot abide “swear words”. And by “swear words” I of course mean fart, butt, sexy, crap, and shut up. Of course.
And again, I really LOVE my sister, but I’m guessing she doesn’t have a lot of imagination when it comes to parenting because she is for the most part parenting her children in the same way we were parented. At least in the acceptiable euphemisms department, anyway. For example, my mom once slapped me across the face for using the word ‘butt’ to refer to someone’s hind end. It is for this reason that I have made it my personal mission to swear like a sailor in front of my children and encourage them to do likewise. I just don’t feel that an atmosphere of repression is healthy for children, because they will just go out and say ‘butt’ in front of their friends and that’s one more thing they hide from you, you know? I have explained to my kids that there are times when it is not appropriate to say shit, lord! and bastard! Those times being mostly when they are at school or there is a Mormon relative in the room with them. This doesn’t keep them from being confused however when some Mormon relatives object to words THAT ARE NOT REALLY SWEAR WORDS BUT THEY CONSIDER THEM SWEAR WORDS ANYWAY.
So a few days ago when we were all in the car on the way to a children’s museum and Leo was being his usual charming self, teasing his cousins and trying to get a laugh, and he said the word ‘sexy’ , I believe he was truly surprised when it caused his cousins to cry out in pain the same way they would have had he punched them in the face. So he said it again. And again. And again. And one more time. He had to be sure, it was scientific people, was he really hurting them? He got the same reaction every time: awful, bloodcurdling screams of death. So he had to throw ‘fart’ in there, because would it get the same reaction? Could it? It did.
sexy
SCREAM
fart
SCREAM
sexy
SCREAM
fart
SCREAM SCREAM SCREAM SCREAM!
Finally my niece who is 10, cried out for someone to please stop Leo because her head was about to explode. So I asked him quietly to stop intenionally tormenting his cousins because it was not polite. And I tried to forget the over dramatized screaming by feeling sorry for my nieces thinking they were most likely not going to achieve the highest degree of glory in the afterlife because they had sat in a moving car while someone said ‘sexy’ and ‘fart’.
