Daddy Words
This post was originally a part of the now defunct Somnaplegic blog.
If you’ve been reading this blog you’ve already probably gotten the sense that I don’t always (or generally) make orthodox (or even good) parenting choices. I feel that my approach has helped prepare my spawn for the modern age. It’s true, we have not spent a lot of time on courtesy or even basic human affection, but he had great daycare teachers, so I figure we should focus on the things they did not. For example, I couldn’t have been prouder when at the age of 9 my son proclaimed he’d mastered sarcasm.
“Oh, really?” I said, skeptically.
“No, mom,” he said rolling his eyes dramatically, “I don’t get it at all.”
Touché, Spawn, my hats off to you, sir.
When Spawn was about 6-7 months old he was crawling all over the place and had a particular affinity for our gas fireplace. We had to keep shark eyes on him to make sure he did not burn a pudgy finger or even his face on the appliance. Our house is open floor plan and there was no real way to both heat the house and keep the child out of the living room. Being handy, our solution was to build a little fence around the fire place using about 100 billion 1 x 2 x 4 inch wooden blocks. I suppose a regular baby fence would have worked, but where was the fun in that?
The process involved using a small nail gun to fasten each block to two blocks on a lower layer. This required roughly 100 trillion tiny nails to be shot into the structure all while holding a 1 x 2 x 4 inch block. My husband, living in the delusion that he is the alpha male and therefore the master of all pneumatic tools, took it upon himself to perform this task. I, being not an idiot and having a very well developed sense of self-preservation, let him perform this task. About every 10th block the nail would divert from it path and shoot out the side of the block. About every 10th time this happened, the nail would find its way into husband’s fingers. Later when people asked about the unique finish of the bare wood block fence I would call it “Early Century Sanguinity Style” and praise husband’s artisanship.
At one point during the process husband thought it would be fitting to anoint our son as part of a father-son bonding ritual. By anoint I mean he smeared his own blood on the baby in a fashion reminiscent of the Celtic war paint of our ancestors, only in this case replacing the blue woad was rusty red human vein squeezings.
A war painted baby is fine and dandy, but my husband has never been one to constrain his creative impulses. He decided that what we needed to make a really good picture was a big fat knife and it just so happened we had one. The baby, being a baby, was instantly very invested in holding the heavy, sharp, vegetable cleaver. And that is how we got a picture of a blood smeared baby holding a scary knife.
Demon eyes NOT added for effect. This was just his natural state at that age.
Really, it makes perfect sense in context [1].
We taught our son the art of the polite social lie early on and also the importance of not embarrassing your parents by telling people the stupid stuff they do when no one is looking. We were also savvy enough to prep him before social gatherings. “Please don’t tell Timmy or his parents that we think they’re fecking idiots. If idiots find out that they are idiots, their brains are likely to explode, and that would really put a downer on the whole birthday party.”
Flagrant lies have also long been a part of our parenting style. In order to make him take the need to lock up ones bicycle seriously, I explained that our home town is infested with ninjas and that ninjas cannot resist stealing unlocked bicycles. It’s just their thing.
Often we would get in the car and Spawn would ask where we are going. This despite the fact that we had engaged in loud conversation right in front of him about how we were going to the movies, or a store, or to throw frisbees in the park. Not three minutes earlier we were shouting across the house to him, “Spawn! Get your bleeding shoes on and come to the door! We’re going to the park to throw the frisbee around and make fun of the hippies.”
In these circumstances we would explain that we were driving to the moon. Having been well acquainted with the heliocentric model of the solar system from an early age, Spawn was understandably skeptical that one could drive to an orbiting satellite.
“That’s why we have to drive east and get up a lot of speed for the jump,” we would explain in a matter of fact tone.
Spawn, to his credit, rarely fell for any of our lies. He knew there were no ninjas, no moon ramp, and determined on his own that Santa Claus was highly improbable. But he enjoyed the idea of ninjas and Santa (less so moon ramps, those just annoyed him) and participated in the fiction willingly.
There was one place in which his healthy skepticism of his parents veracity did not serve anyone. Unlike my best friends eldest child who refused all foot ware but rubber boots at an early age, Spawn never had any issue with wearing socks. He was more than happy to keep his feet encased in poly cotton. Getting him to wear socks was not the issue. Getting him to CHANGE his socks was another matter.
Spawn thought nothing of walking across sand boxes, grass, dirt patches, or mud in nothing but stocking feet. He also thought nothing of wearing soiled socks for days on end.
“You have to change your socks, Spawn. If you don’t your feet will rot.”
“Uh huh, Mom, sure, my feet will “rot.”
“No really, your grandma got Jungle Rot in Panama. Fungus is real and it will consume your feet.”
“Yup, I bet the Ninjas put the rot on your feet after stealing your bike.”
“Seriously, Spawn. Change you’re bloody socks. That’s gross.”
And then, in a masterful act of appropriation he took my own favorite phrase - usually deployed when my husband asks for Castles, or a Hobbit Hole, or something equally ridiculous, like mayonnaise – and turned it right back on me.
“Yup, I’m gonna get right on that, mom.”
One day, when he was, oh, six years old, I was napping on the couch when he came out of his bedroom dancing. “Guess what mom?”
“What?”
“Guess?”
“You’re audition tape to Star Search was accepted?”
He continued jigging about, sliding on the kitchen floor.
“You robbed a bank and are taking us all to Disney World?”
“Nope. I haven’t changed my socks in 5 days!” He proclaimed with a gleeful, shit-eating grin.
I looked down and thought, That boy doesn’t own any gray socks. He owns white and black socks. Dear atheist god, what have you wrought?
After I held him down and peeled the, for simplicity let’s call them “socks,” off his feet, they retained their inverted footlike shape, stiff like burlap dipped in tar.
“BATH. NOW.”
He moonwalked to the shower.
That was the day we sat on the couch and looked at pages and pages of images of fungal infections on Google. After helping him read a Web MD article about fungal skin infections he did finally believe us that not changing your socks can have medical implications. I’m not sure it had the desired effect of making fungus look unattractive though, as my husband and I are unrepentant zit, scab, blister, and cyst pickers who kept pointing and shouting, “Oooh, click on that one! No, click on the green oozing one! Wow! Why can’t I have an abscess like that? Man, I would just squeeze and squeeze and squeeze that bugger!”
Look, if you’ve never Googled “giant horse zit” you probably won’t understand.
Only once did Spawn slip up and embarrass us in a public setting. Correction, he’s embarrassed us TONS, but only once was it using our own words.
As a preschooler the spawn was always trying out new words and we certainly didn’t shirk on our duties to introduce him to the wide world of colorful language. Our “Philosophy” was/is that the best way to keep your kid from blurting out a dirty word on accident is to introduce them to all the dirty words and explain when such words are and are not appropriate to use and by whom.
Explaining to my son why he shouldn’t call the cat a shitty asshole (the cat was a shitty asshole) my husband said, “Those are ‘Daddy Words’. Only adults should say them. It’s important to know when it’s OK to say Daddy Words and you haven’t had enough experience to know when that is OK, So for now don’t say them.”
We even established a policy in our household called “permission to swear.” For example something roughly approaching the following happened in first grade on the way home from afterschool daycare:
“How was your day at school?”
“Well, Timmy hit his head on the monkey bars. He said I was laughing at him. Which I wasn’t, and . . . permission to swear?”
“Permission granted.”
“Well, the asshole grabbed my head and slammed it into the bars.”
“That little fuck. Did you rat him out to The Man?”
“No, but I told him he was an idiot and a scuzz bucket.”
“That sounds fair. Need me to go rough him up?”
“Maybe later.”
The system worked, except for one time.
When my son was about 3 ½, when my husband arrived to pick him up after daycare one afternoon. The teacher pulled my husband aside and relayed the following story.
One of the other children, not Spawn, had dropped an F-bomb on the playground. When the teacher explained to the child that this was not appropriate speech, Spawn wandered up and said, “Oh yes, those are Daddy Words. You should not use Daddy Words in public.” Then, being the helpful child he was, and knowing that it’s impossible to know what you’re not supposed to say if no one tells you, he proceeded to list, in glorious detail, ALL of the Daddy Words children should not repeat in public.
The teachers for their part, could not interrupt the long and detailed list of expletives, because they, all of them, had their hands over their mouths trying not to let the children see the uncontrollable smirks that were in danger of spilling over into full on laughter.
When my husband came home and told me the story I laughed and laughed and laughed. He was not amused. Here’s why. I’m actually the person in the family with the constant stream of curses, often going into graphic detail as to what exactly one can do with their grandmas potted plant and a deceased gold fish. My husband, by comparison is quite restrained in the presence of small children.
“Why did I call them Daddy Words?” He moaned smacking his head repeatedly. “Why didn’t I say ‘Mommy Words?”
“To late,” I smirked. “No take backs.”
And that’s how my son’s preschool classroom learned how not to swear.
~~~
[1] Yes, I do in fact have a death grip on the extremely dull knife just out of frame. I’m a questionable parent, not an idiot.
*This post was originally a part of the now defunct Somnaplegic blog.
