This Mom Yells and Swears. Often. Deal with It.
I yell a lot.
It’s not something I consciously decide to do. When I yell, I am not yelling at anyone in particular. My voice just gets loud and propels me around the kitchen, for example the other night when my two oldest adult kids, 32 and 35 pointed out my behavior to me.
I had naturally fallen into my kitchen routine of yelling, and swearing — a lot — and my kids couldn’t help but notice as they sat at the dining room table trying to have a conversation while I was cleaning up after a 4th of July dinner. My kids didn’t notice the three large flies that were dive-bombing my head as I scraped dishes, sponged off the island counter and rinsed the plates in the sink. Each time I felt the near-miss of wings and a buzz racing past my ear I swatted and batted at the air with a damp dishtowel yelling, “Get away from me you motherfuckers!”
It didn’t occur to me I had an audience. I was busy dodging flies. Why would I notice my kids?
Yes, I know mothers are not supposed to swear in front of their children. My mother never swore in front of me until I was an adult and even now when she swears it’s in a half-whisper. But I am my father’s daughter. My dad dropped f-bombs a lot and I thought it was funny and exciting in an Oh-My-God-We’re-In-For-It-Now kind of way.
When Dad muttered “the f-ing this” and the “f-ing that” under his breath it was an unspoken, mostly assumed-by-me declaration of his permission that I could swear, too, for a narrow window of time. That is, before my mother came stomping in the den to yell at my father for swearing in front of me. I’d glimpse at him to check his reaction to my own swearing. Most of the time his face expressed, You should be in trouble for swearing but it’s a crack up… just don’t let your mother catch you.
So I swear. Kind of a lot. Unapolagtically.
I’ve heard other people say that those who swear are using profanity as fill-in words because there is a lack of wherewithal to find more appropriate ones to use. Not me. I swear because it feels cathartic. It feels good to fire off a solid, full-bodied curse word. If done correctly, it’s a pointed, no-bullshit immediate response to an urgent problem. For me, swearing is the proverbial crashing and smashing of dishes on a hard floor in an “Opa!” kind of way; a satisfying rebellious snap that echos loudly popping pillows of air from a sheet of bubble wrap.
Last week on the eve of the 4th of July, as I ducked and weaved around the kitchen those flies continued to mock me, lazily buzzing over and around my head just slow enough to be exasperating, yet fast enough so that I couldn’t take them down. It was getting personal. I kept batting at the air, my expletives spraying the room along with soapy water that flung from the once-damp-now-turned-wet dishtowels.
My kids laughed at me as they sat front and center enjoying my one-woman show and said, “You are so much like Grandpa it’s scary.”
“Whaddya mean?” I asked.
They said, “You swear and yell just like Grandpa, and you look ridiculous fighting flies! Yelling and swearing at them. Mom, most people do what you’re doing in private.”
What the fuck? I thought. That was not my experience growing up. My dad went to war if there was a fly in the kitchen. He, too, took their assault personally. I got my moves from watching him. But, I guess I should be proud that I somehow raised my children with enough decorum to know that stomping around and yelling and swearing was something they knew not to do in public.
I think I am supposed to be embarrassed that I swear. It’s confusing. On one hand swearing has always felt so natural, like breathing or laughing. On the other hand, it once got me into big trouble.
My childhood nanny was a proper British lady. I was seven years old when Julie held my hand as she walked me home from grammar school one afternoon and casually asked how my day was and if I had any homework.
“Yes!” I yelled in my outside voice, “I have to draw a stupid fucking pie in pieces and color them in.”
I was impressed with my answer as I was still learning the appropriate way to use the f-word, and this sounded right. My nanny was not impressed. She dragged me the rest of the way home by my earlobe and made me take a big bite from a soapy bar of Irish Spring. Apart from my humiliation, I was confused because profanity was not a shameful thing in my world.
Swearing was intergenerational, on my father’s side only. Swearwords served their purpose. They drew attention, created funny, exasperated and helpless reactions and definitely made jokes funnier. At Shabbat dinners and other family gatherings my grandmother would begin to tell wonderfully funny stories over coffee and Mandelbrot, and all of us kids and adults would sit in rapture as we waited for the punchline. Then, and only in Yiddish, Grandma would unleash a string of bad words at the end of her stories so only the adults could understand, while us kids would protest and yell, “No fair! What did she say?”
I learned then and there that bad words in any language were worth knowing.
My children swear, too, by the way. They use words that even I wouldn’t say. As kids, the boys tossed around swear words haphazardly, but only on the jungle gym or in the hallways between classes and mostly out of context. Now as adults they make it a rule to never use profanity on a date or during a meeting unless to emphasize an important point. My daughter was never a big user of profanity because Disney showtunes didn’t use them, but then she grew up and moved to London to work on her doctorate for five years. When she moved home, she brought with her many new words, one of which I have never been able to bring myself to say. This word is said a lot in London, however, used freely and casually when describing an unpleasant grocery checker, or a cranky server in a pub, or even a friend who was being silly or chronically late to gatherings. This word hurts my ears and well, I have my limits. This word never falls out of my mouth. Hardly ever. I am talking about the C-word. You know what I mean. It rhymes with “grunt.” I can’t say it. Can’t even write it down.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be writing so openly about my carefree use of yelling and profanity as it reveals a side of me that up until now, only my pots and pans (and immediate family) have been privy to. I certainly don’t share this side of myself with even my closest friends.
I’m never the first one to swear in a conversation. I wait until someone else opens the gate. I would never want people to have a bad impression of me, nor ever experience my air-to-ground assault in the kitchen. It’s a side of me that is best kept private.
To a certain extent I feel it is important to present one’s self with a certain decorum, to present a positive first impression.
But then I think: Fuck it. I’m human.
