My daughter said those very words to me about a week ago. She is only 3 so of course I could feel my jaw drop halfway to the floor. Skating over the fact that those two words obviously don’t rhyme, how could that awful word be coming from the mouth of the sweetest child in the world? Well because Mommy said it first. When I was about sixteen, I found out that my father hated that word more than any other, so it’s been my go to curse word ever since.
That’s right at twenty-eight years old I am still rebelling against my father. Smart, huh?
Now, the first thing my own mother would have done is washed my mouth out with soap, but being the progressive mother that I am, I simply asked her not to say that word. Later that night I was telling my husband about it and I found that I was ashamed that she learned this behavior from me. At the time it didn’t bother me very much, but if I was ashamed to tell my husband about it then something was wrong.
I have found that one of the hardest parts about being a mommy is learning that our children will emulate our behavior. Is that the way I want my daughter to be? Of course not! I know it’s old fashioned, but I do want her to be a lady, in looks and in manner. So, now comes the hard part. While it is sometimes easy to know what to teach our children, it isn’t so simple to teach ourselves to act in a way we want them to imitate. To do it we must undo years of what society and we ourselves have made of our characters and go back to what (at least here in the South) our mothers and grandmothers taught us.
Here comes the good old double standard. Contrary to popular belief, the f word really does sound worse coming out of a woman than a man. Yes, I really did just type that. It’s true. No matter what you do and how far our society advances, it will always be true. So I am going to try to do it. Try to be that lady my Granny always wanted me to be and the kind I want my daughter to be. It’s hard. I have a friend who says I was raised in a bar with sailors. That’s awful! Maybe I should wash my own mouth out?
