3 Feb 2014
I swear if I hurt myself, I curse when I drop things, and I’m plain rude if I’m woken up early.
Unfortunately, my kids have begun to repeat some of my more choice phrases. This was of course an entirely predictable event, but I just didn’t think about it before it was too late. My parenting strategy to date has been to shake my head at any naughty behaviour, and pretend I have no idea where it comes from. This is less easy with bad language, which so obviously comes from me.
For a while I tried to pretend that they must have got their foul habit from big boys in the playground. But one morning on the school run, late as usual, I was fuming at a woman who was holding up the traffic because she couldn’t get her huge car through a perfectly adequate gap. She huffed and braked and insisted that others reversed down the road, and was generally hopeless. The traffic behind her got more and more irate until I heard a familiar voice from the seat behind me. Daughter had wound down the window, and was hollering in her best Saaaf London accent: “Come on LUV! You could get a BUS through there!”
A few nights later I was trying to cook supper, get my son in the bath and answer the phone when someone rang the doorbell. Daughter put her hands on her hips, rolled her eyes and sighed: “Bloody hell!!” at exactly the same time as me. Turns out she’s a pretty good mimic.
Both incidents forced me to accept that not only do my cherubic little children swear, but they swear with exactly the same pained sarcasm as their mother.
My only consolation is that I’m not alone.
My friend Kate once had a truly vile boss, so her husband bought her a stress-busting desk toy. It was a tiny punch ball on a pole, and every time you flicked it hard it would yell: “Screw you!” “Stupid asshole!” “Shithead!” It was a thoughtful gift that brought her endless joy in the office. Alas her son found it, played with it on the stairs for half an hour, and repeated it verbatim to his class teacher. Awkward.
Children swearing is like a rogue state acquiring nuclear weapons; once it’s in their arsenal, they never give it up. And so I am resolved to hearing effing and blinding from the mouths of my once innocent babes, and have no one to blame but myself.
