02.02.07

I’m having a serious swearing problem. I’ve been especially bad lately, partly I think because the book I’m reading is laced with a lot of profanity, the milspeak kind no less, obscene phrases so creatively combined that you can’t help but admire the military’s impressive grasp of the more polluted side of the English language. But to be honest, I’ve been very overly excessive with my language for a while now. Although I’ve used profanity in the past, I was always very careful about who I cussed around and whether the cuss word was appropriate for the situation (if you belong to the profane speaking world then you know what I’m talking about, there are just some situations that necessitate vulgarity). When we found out that we were pregnant with Liam, Mike and I decided that we were going to make an effort to clean up our language. We’re both college graduates, which essentially means that we’re both exercised in the practice of expressing ourselves in a formal, orderly, academic manner. So, not cussing for us should be perfectly possible, right? Well, Mike is doing very well. Every once and awhile he’ll drop a few (usually when trying to fix some sort of home appliance), but all in all he’s turning into the perfect model of the non-cussing citizen. Me on the other hand, not so good. I said the “f” word in front of a kid the other day while I was grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. A few minutes later, I bumped into my old friend Crystal, looking all belly round and beautiful in her last trimester of pregnancy, and said a cuss word in front of her. Crystal and I have known each other since high school and used to hang out a lot back in the day, cruising around in her mustang, smoking Virginia Slims, talking about boys and yes, swearing a whole lot. In the middle of our delightful conversation about babies and nursery storage containers, I told her that we were starting Liam on solids and that my parents got me a new puree blender because the one I had s-cked –ss. Yes, I said that very dirty phrase, out in the open in the diaper section of Wal-mart. I detected a slight shock from Crystal and started thinking you know, maybe I need to just admit that I am now an adult, a responsible adult and in the adult world we don’t use the word –ss anymore, instead we say butt, or if you want to be a cute adult then you say tushy, and most importantly we don’t say s-cked –ss, we simply say “my blender doesn’t work very well”. So, I’m going to make another feeble attempt and cleaning up my language. If you hear me say a bad word, tell me to pay you a dollar. At the rate I’m going, I may make a lot of my friends rich.

I was holding Liam the other day and Mike came along, wrapped his arms around us and gave us both a big hug. All of a sudden he squeezed hard and then let go, stepped back and took a moment. When I asked him what was wrong he said that all of a sudden all he could think about was all the kids in the world who don’t get group hugs from their parents, who grow up abused and unloved. It’s funny how before you become a parent, you hear stories about children who are kidnapped, abused, mistreated and feel really horrible. But when you have your own child stories about abused children touch you very differently. In fact, they don’t just touch you, they literally slice into you and rip your heart out because all you can think about is “what if it were Liam”. This happened to me again today when I came across a news article concerning a hospital in Russia where nurses have been gagging orphan infants with plaster tape to keep them from crying. Apparently a patient managed to get some fotage on her cell cam of a baby moaning through his taped shut mouth. Of course, everyone is in uproar. I can’t help but wonder how long this had already been going on, and whether anything would have ever been done if some random person hadn’t caught it on camera.

Russian shock at gagged babies

Warning: the fotage is a little hard to stomach so…