My wife hates me when I’m sick and she becomes the nurse from hell.. She’s not comfortable around sick people in general, with the exception of our kids, but she particularly hates when I’m under foul weather. I think it’s because she popped in to see me once when I was sick just after we started dating. I was wrapped like a mummy in sticky streams of toilet paper and a dirty blanket, and I had stunk up my apartment with vicks vapo rub, body order and a vile case of flatulence. The deadly aroma must have nearly floored her, and dried her out for me just a little.

When the kids are sick however, my wife is a regular Florence Nightingale. The smallest sniffle is combated with the largest case of extra soft aloe moistened tissues. When the sniffles progress to long streams of gooey green, my wife is there with a holster full of baby wipes. And if that thick mucus river threatens to spill over the top lip and drip into the mouth, or is about to be lapped up by a child’s tongue, my wife will use her sleeve. Headaches are instantly massaged away with oils and herbs, skinned knees are covered with kisses and band aids, and broken hearts are patched back together with huge hugs and love.

But I’ve laid alone in my bed sick and dying, waiting for a tablet of aspirin that never comes.

I was at work a couple of weeks ago coughing and hacking up chewy chunks of phlegm, and spraying slimy sneezes against my laptop screen. The woman who works across the short wall between our cubes had her umbrella open to keep from getting drenched. Behind her through a window, you could see the sun’s rays shimmering on the Hudson, and exploding like shards of light off the windows of the New York skyline. And yet she was preparing for rain.

I was fighting the effects of some nasty germ my kids brought home. It was the kind of germ that clings to their sticky fingers and finds their way into your ears, nose and throat. You eat their scraps and wipe their runny noses with your fingers in a pinch. They in turn stick their shit and booger stained digits on things you’re sure to touch a hundred times a day, so it would be a small miracle not to get sick.

I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job fending off the relentless assault of age against my body and mind. Considering all my vices I’ve held myself together pretty well. But the germ that made its way inside me was the kind of germ that Echinacea and garlic cocktails could never scare away, and it was the kind of germ that crippled me like no germ has ever crippled me before.

The woman who works across the short wall between our cubes got up to get her second cup of coffee of the morning, and slipped into the bathroom for a quick squirt. When she came back to her desk she was wearing a plastic rain resistant poncho and wading boots up to her hips.

She leaned over the wall and quietly asked me “does your wife take care of you when you’re sick?” “Oh god no, she sucks at that,” I tell her before she can get the question out. I laugh at the thought of my wife nursing me back to health. It’s a painful laugh, but one I’ve come to call a friend “My wife hates when I’m sick, and it pisses her off when I’m under the weather or injured,” I tell her. My wife doesn’t know how to handle it, and so I’ve become more a burden rather than a patient to her. But when you love somebody, you love them for what they are, not what they aren’t. She’s so much more of what she is than what she isn’t, and she’s so much more than she could ever never be.

“What does she say to you when you’re sick?” asks the woman across the wall. I tell her my wife asks me “to stop being sick.” Sometimes she says it with a look in her eye, and sometimes she says everything else but that, until it becomes obvious by its absence. She never comes right out and says “stop being sick”, but the message is pretty clear.

Of course when the nursing clog is on the other foot and my wife’s been ill, I’ve held buckets under her chin for her to puke into. I’ve wiped fever sweat from her brow with a cold, wet wash cloth, and massaged the sickness form her sore muscles. I’ve dealt with bowel movements misfired into brand new lacy thongs, and washed out vomit and snot from torn and tattered bath towels.

But when I’m sick, I feel like maybe it would be better for everyone involved if I did it out on the garage instead of the house. The coughing fits that rattle the beams in the ceiling, and the vibrations of violent upheavals of bile, would more than likely wake the kids. And that would wake the wife whose wrath you never need to know.

In the garage the only ones I might disturb are the squirrels. I’ve had my run-ins with the squirrels in the past, but being shooed away like a varmint begging for scraps just because I’m ill, has given me a better perspective on the squirrels plight. And I think they’ve taken notice. “The squirrels are more comfort to me when I’m sick, than my wife is,” I tell the woman across the wall. And then I sneeze, and she ducks.

Crawling out from under her desk she asks “isn’t your wife going back to school to be a nurse?” My insides chuckle a sickly laugh and I run my hand from my forehead to the back of my skull. “Yeah” I say. 

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A couple of nights ago my wife and I were out to dinner with the kids and their grandparents, after my son’s Christmas concert. We promised him ice cream and fries, instead of the traditional bouquet of roses. The combination gave him a wicked ache in the belly that would have felt no worse if he had swollowed petals and thorns.

My wife and I ordered 2 glasses of wine, but we spent most of our time too busy with our children running wild to drink them. They were burning off the last bits of their daily dose of excitement they have for being alive. Sometimes it seems almost heartless not to let them enjoy their lives while they still can. We lazily chased after them to make sure no one got hurt. We corralled them in just enough to give the appearnece to the diners and the wait staff that we were in control of the situation. But really we were prepared to ruin the dining excperience of the entire restaurant if it meant our kids would fall asleep on the ride home.

It had been one of those days for both my wife and I. Days like these are like seagulls full of scraps and garbage. They circle above waiting to take a crap on your head. So we were really looking forward to washing the day from our hair and clothes. We were going to do this by watching children scream, shout, and holler but not sing, their way through the holiday classics. And then we were going to have their grandparents baby sit them while we snuck in a date.

My wife battled the house all day with sucking and sweeping machines against a foe that is capable of messing itself up even when no one’s home. Meanwhile I endured the two hour commute home from work that seems to drain my spirit at times, if not my wallet, one mile at a time. And so even a shared glass of wine at some theme restaurant in the mall has to be embraced when you have kids, because that might be the most romance you’ll see for a while.

Eventually we wore out our welcome at the restaurant and so we packed up the kids and stuffed our leftovers into a doggy bag. We paid the bill and looked down at our drinks that were more than half full. Besides a small bowl of salty crunchy things, the wine had been the only thing my wife and I ordered, and there was no way we were leaving behind a glass and a half of paid-for liquid bliss.

To be able to afford to eat and drink now is almost a luxery. A couple of glasses of wine or a box of Enteman’s walnut danish ring have become the new vacation for the middle class. But I guess we should just be happy that no one’s taxed the air yet. Unless of course you consider the coordinated pollution of the shrinking supply of oxygen, in order to sell us air filters and gas masks, to be a kind of tax.

We grabbed my daughter’s Elmo sippy cup from one of our bags and poured her water into a potted plant on the floor beside the table. We mixed the cabernet and the pinot noir together in the sippy cup until Elmo was flushed blood red. I held the cup up to the light and saw the dark crimson blend of reds flowing through Elmo’s body. I took a long drag from the rubber straw and giggled to myself how delisiously wrong this all was.

Afterwards. in the front seat of the car parked in a crowded lot, I secretly sucked one last sip of that tasty wine blend, from my baby’s Elmo sippy cup. It was just enough wine to cut the edge that wild children can put you on, but I assue you, not enough to make me drive anything less than safely home.

In my life, I’ve taken wine out of bars that I’d been drinking in, sometimes just walking out with the glass in my hand in plain view. And I’ve certainly snuck wine into a bar when I was low on funds, and I’d refill my glass when no one was looking. But I’d never before stolen wine in the same cup my 2 year old darling daughter drinks her heavenly fruit juice from.

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Over the last year and a half I’ve told my son I was going to cut his finger off with a butter knife, a chainsaw, an axe, a pair of scissors and my teeth. I’ve told him I would cut it off and cook it in the toaster oven until it blistered pink and raw. Then feed it to him on a bun with a blob of ketchup on top. That part always freaks him out, he hates ketchup.

I tell him I’m going to destroy that finger, vaporize it, or grind it to a bloody pulp if he ever flips me off with it again. My distaste for being flipped off by an eight year old has angered me enough to want to make that finger disappear. Of course I’d never hurt a hair on his head or melt his middle finger with a blow torch for that matter, but sometimes I want him to know, understand and feel just how much he’s pissed me off. Part of me wants him to think that I might be crazy enough to do it.

The only problem is, I become so animated in my anger and my threats are so over the top, its almost comical. When I go off on one of my rants I have no idea how I stop myself from laughing in the middle of it. That’s why I stomp around and slam cupboard doors. I make as much noise as I can like a ghost rattling chains; to not only scare the shit out of my son, but to cover up the sound of my own laughter.

My son is beginning to realize that I would never do the things I say I’d do. He’s starting to believe that I would never force his finger into an industrial fan or push it through a freshly sharpened wood chipper. Little by little he sees that as bad as my bark can be, my bite might not be as bad as that. And so the more graphic my threats become the more apt my son is to smile wildly and say “cool!”

I only ever call upon the angry beast inside me when logic and reasoning has left both my son and I exhausted and tied up in a stalemate. And so in those controlled bursts of rage I’ve said things to my son, that a normal, rational human being should never say to a child. Of course I think most parents give up their rights to ‘normal’ and ‘rational’ by the time they buy their first jumbo pack of diapers. But maybe that’s just me.

My son knows how much I love him, and he knows I would never want to hurt him. I love and support him unconditionally, and would slay ill-tempered dragons for him. But it’s nice to know that he thinks I just might be mad enough to cut his whole hand off if he ever says fuck you to me again with this his middle finger.

Recently my son has taken to pointing his penis straight up in the air when he pees. He tells me he wants to see how high in the air the stream will go, but instead I get to see how well he can piss all over himself. I tell him “do what you want with that thing, its yours to play with, but if you piss on anything other than the middle of the water at the bottom of the bowl, I will cut that thing off.”

He just laughs at me, and I tell him “If you can’t wipe that shit eating grin off your face, at least wipe the seat off for your mother.” I walk away as he raises his arm and then his fist to me, and starts to flip me off. Thanks to Elisa Bishop for letting me use the image of her surgically repaired “fuck you” digit.

The Girl Who Sings But Doesn’t Speak

I came home for Thanksgiving, my first year of college. It was a semester that began with pant-soiling food poisoning during orientation week, and ended in a haze from beers and bongs that crippled my grades. I spent more time stoned and watching the cracks in the ceiling spread down onto the walls, than going to classes.

In that time, my hair had grown to the tops of my shoulders and my beard crept down the length of my face. As the cracks in the ceiling spider-webbed down the walls and onto the floor, my hair sprouted from my head and face and my grades succumbed to the constant bombardment of a semester full of weeklong weekends.

My parents, I think, were less disturbed by me being tossed from school and pissing away three months of tuition, than they were by the length of my hair when I arrived home the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

For them my hair signified the beginning of the end of their control over who and what I would turn out to be. It was the crashing down of their empire that had ruled over me with iron fists. They had tried their best to raise me to be exactly how they wanted me, and in doing so helped make me rebellious and defiant, and exactly what they hoped I would not be.

In the end they provided the seeds and the water that grew their little boy into a man, the same seeds and water I used to grow my hair long, down to my shoulders and over the length of my face.

My mom greeted me at the door as my ride drove off through the back end of the neighborhood towards safety. She met me with a pair of hedge clippers in one hand and a determination to do battle with the wild snakes that hissed and spit from beneath my Boston Red Sox baseball cap.

The scene was nearly comical and I had to swallow hard to keep the laughter from spilling out of me. I knew this would only fuel her fire, but sometimes laughs are hard to come by, so you have grab them when you can. It’s never wise to laugh in the face of danger unless danger takes short strides and you’ve given yourself a decent head start.

My mom chased me through the yard with those stumpy legs of hers, slowed only by clumsy shoes and the large sheers my dad used to trim the bushes. She kept up the chase for the better part of an hour as I dodged behind the trees they had planted some twenty years earlier.

Back then they were just thin saplings that would bend in the wind, but now were large enough to duck behind and separate myself from the jaws of those hungry blades. We would run around the yard for a while and then rest for a minute, with the two of us separated by the beautifully tall trees and lush bushes that lined the perimeter of the back yard, and then resume the chase.

There was no words between us only the exchange of weary sounds choked by the weight of the battle. But I could see in her eyes she would never give up, and would never give in, even if she couldn’t catch me she would somehow get her way.

Eventually, the effect of three months of bong hits on my lungs took it’s toll, and I could no longer do battle with one who’s will was greater than my own. She had not succeeded in cutting my hair, that I would eventually do on my own, just as the charcoaled turkey and stuffing were about to be served.

With far more determination than I had estimated, she chased me from the yard, down the street and past the houses of the neighborhood kids I had grown up with, dragging the clippers in her one hand and with the other, throwing rocks at me as I fled.

I eat scraps for most of my meals, because it’s either that or I walk around the neighborhood holding a sign that says “Will Work For Food.” Over the last year my grocery bill has exploded, so instead of eating meals I follow my kids around the house with a plate in one hand, a fork and knife in the other, and a cloth napkin tied around my neck.

I’ve eaten food from the floor that one of my kids has dropped and forgotten about. Sometimes these tasty morsels are still pretty soggy. The more the scraps dry before I find them, the more they taste like the cookies or pizza they once were, and less like the slobber inside the mouth of one my kids.

I’ve gnawed on bricks of macaroni and cheese and wilted carrots and celery sticks. I’ve forced down half chewed broccoli crusted chicken that was too big for them to swallow, so they spit it back out onto their plate.

I’ve snacked on crackers and pretzels wedged between the cushions of the couch, and gulped backwash cocktails from the bottom of juice boxes. I’ve eaten food that has long since turned cold, after it’s been cried on, and sneezed and coughed at. And I’ve probably eaten food that’s been handled by dirty hands after my kids have wiped their ass or picked their nose.

When I walk in the door from work each night, I grab my kids and hug and kiss them like it’s been weeks since I’ve seen them last. I pluck crumbs from their clothes and steal bites of food they might be holding, when they’re not looking.

I suppose I could eat real meals but then I’d have to keep the house cold this winter, or sell my car and bike the 50 miles to work and back each day. Scraps are free because you’re just going to throw them out anyway. And they’re plentiful because kids are always going to make them. Long lost leftovers with a side of clumps of dusty crumbs, is a meal I can afford, from food I can’t afford to throw away.

For the most part I love being a father and the bread winner in my family. It’s what a man is supposed to do, so I do my best to do the right thing. But every once in a while, the daily sacrifices we make to be decent parents, are more than I can take. It makes me want to scream into a stack of pillows, or run outside in the quiet of the night and curse the heavens. Or worse, run straight for the nearest pub and blow my weekly allowance on a mug of beer and french fries.

Today my son stabbed a tangerine with a pencil after I ‘tortured’ him for a while with algebra. When he pulled the pencil out of the tangerine’s fruit, the point was missing from its tip. I tore out chunks of the tangerines flesh with my fingers, looking for the tip of that pencil. I found nothing but seeds and pulp. The juice ran down my arms as I held each chunk up to the kitchen light for close examination.

I dropped each piece of fruit onto a pile of tangerine guts, at the bottom of a bowl. I poured in the creamy nut pulp left in the last few sips of some almond milk, and sprinkled over it crushed up bits of hardened buttered waffles. I tied a napkin around my neck, whipped out my fork and knife, and ate like a king. And I may have even done all that with dirty hands after scratching my ass or picking my nose.

But at least for now I’ve spared my children the embarrassment of seeing their dad bartering with neighbors, work for food.

Guns are part of boys’ DNA. Girls’ DNA is made up of sugar and spice and everything nice, but boys’ genetic blue print consists of shrapnel and gunpowder.

My son is fascinated with guns, whether they’re the kind you hold in your hand or the ones you discharge with a mouse and a space bar. He loves when I shoot nerf darts at him as he circles around the yard trying to dodge them. He loves just as much to bolt inside and play an assortment of bizarre shoot ‘em up games. I watch with wonder as he fires at moving targets of stick figures, and blows off body parts with a shotgun. An endless river of red blood gushes from their skinny black frames, and splash against the pale white backdrop.

Just the other day my son accidentally shot his little sister between the eyes with a nerf gun. Needless to say that gun is now in a million little pieces scattered over the driveway, and a few large chunks dumped in the trash. It started innocently enough with him chasing her around the house shooting spongy nerf darts at her feet, making her giggled as she ran away from him.

I’ve warned him about shooting people in the face to the point where I can no longer bare the sound of my own voice saying those words. Before I could get off yet another warning shot of wasted syllables, my son’s gun went off and shot my daughter between the eyes. I went ballistic and the gun was instantly vaporized against the cracked asphalt. My daughter wasn’t hurt but she screamed that heart breaking wail anyway, because she knew she’d get special attention and then parting gifts, if she did. My son was so distraught over hitting her that when I came back into the house, I eventually found him crying in the bathroom. He was sitting in the toilet, not on the toilet, trying to flush himself down the drain.

All of this comes on the heels of my son shooting himself in the penis two days earlier, just for fun.

I guess it’s easy to criticize me for allowing my son to have guns. Believe me it wasn’t my intention. I tried my best from the start to never let him have even one. Somewhere someone cracked and gave in to his insistence, the flood gates opened and there was no turning back. Over the years his arsenal of dart and water weapons has suffered terrible defeats against the rage that poured through my hands, fueled by darts bouncing off my eye. But the world is a violent place, and guns are constantly in our consciousness, and so it was easy for him to build back up his arsenal.

My son is relentless, and if you give him an inch he’ll take a couple of million light years. The word “no” sounds at worse like a “probable maybe” to him. My son wanted a certain gun five weeks before Christmas. I told him you don’t ask for things so close to the holidays but he never let up. He wore me down. You can judge me if you want, but if you have no idea what it’s like to be beaten down by an 8 year old with a will more powerful than your own, then you need to reserve judgment until you’ve suffered a bit of that hell for yourself.

I’ve given in and enabled his joy for guns because he’s assured me he has no interest in killing for his country. Not his words mine. That might sound hash to those of you who feel like that’s a little unpatriotic. After all, our country was founded on killing and I suppose that will be the only way we’ll ever perpetuate it. It’s just that in my lifetime, we haven’t fought a worthwhile war, for the right reasons, or against an enemy that actually existed. War has become, and maybe always was, a really nasty business transaction that a few thousand working class pawns are sacrificed for.

You have to wonder if wars are waged not because evil governments need to be overthrown or natural resources need to be raped from someone else’s land, but because men are really just little boys looking for any excuse at all, to squeeze the trigger of a gun.

And maybe the gun is just a penis.

Whether it’s a pointed finger gun firing pellets of spit from the sound your mouth makes, or a bb gun plucking tin cans from a wooden fence, we grow up loving guns. We love to shoot, even if it’s symbolic gun firing hostile and hateful words. Or even if he gun is just the pecker in our pants, cocked and fired. That’s the gun we love to shoot most.

But it’s not just guns. Its catapults and slingshots, and bows with arrows and wooden spears. And its sticks and stones that break my bones, and words that aren’t supposed to hurt me. Of course we learn pretty early on that words may not hurt the most, but they hurt the longest. What hurts the most, kills you in a second, because you feel it all at once and then feel nothing at all. Angry, hateful words on the other hand, hurt forever a little bit at a time.

My hope is that my son gets “shooting a gun” out of his system long before play turns to real life. In the meantime criticize and judge me all you want, my son is a happy and well adjusted killer.

I took my son to the indoor skate park last weekend and he wound up face planted at the bottom of a wooden half pipe. For an instant it was the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen. I’ve watched a lot of video of really bad things on Youtube, but this was MY son smashing his nose on the ground at 20 mph, right in front of my eyes. For me that moment, that was harder to endure than any video I’ve watched in disgust or despair.

It’s weird because I had this ominous feeling that something bad was going to happen when we first got there. It was a gray cloud that hung looming in my heart even though it was a warm and sunny day outside. It didn’t ease my mind when my son tripped over his skateboard and crashed into the snack bar display window on his way to register for lessons. It felt like my son was way in over his head, as kids a couple of years older maneuvered around the skate park with a little more ease, and a little less recklessly.

The instructor of these ‘lessons’ was well intentioned, but looked like he had just crawled out of bed after crawling into it not too many hours earlier. Each kid in the class was given a brief taste of instruction and then kicked out of the nest, and then expected to fly on their own without a hitch. My son tried a couple of kick flips onto a splintered platform, and then a couple of grinds across a one foot high rail. Each time he crashed it brought him a couple of inches closer to falling off the ramp altogether, and landing on the cold cement floor below.

Without much help from anyone else, and with balls as big as coconuts, my son figured out how to navigate through a moving maze of skaters . Down a ten foot drop he plunged, over a couple of ramps, and then back up the other side of a half pipe that slowed him to a stop. It was really a beautiful thing to see. I caught him doing it on video even though I felt like recording him might jinx him. I was partly afraid I might catch some horrific fall on video, but more than that I thought I might cause it.

And then he crashed. On the video you can see him land face first onto the floor, then jumbled madness as I raced from behind a mesh net wall that separated the dads from their sons. I bolted across a couple of ramps and slid down the last small one where my son laid on the ground. A little blood dripped from his left nostril, and a long welt formed across the right side of his nose. The instructor who got to him first, told me my son’s nose was broken. The words sucked the life out of me, and I would have barfed if I hadn’t been so busy keeping myself from passing out.

I picked him up and he wrapped his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist. He let out a cry filled with sorrow as much as agony, one that I’d never heard before. It was like he’d been wounded to his core, and even his soul was in pain. I sucked my own tears back into my eyes and swallowed them. Unfortunately my hippie shoes with the soft leather soles wouldn’t let me walk up the ramp I’d just so easily slid down. It was the only way out of this crazy labyrinth of mega ramps and quarter pipes, and with each step I took with my son in my arms, I slid back down to the bottom.

On the ride to the hospital my son held a bag of ice against his nose and rested his head against the backseat divider with his eyes closed. Soft whimpers came from his throat like wounded whispers. My daughter freed her arms, leaned out of her car seat and towards my son, and sang to him the whole ride there.

We waited in the emergency waiting room and watched some Murder TV on the Discovery channel. My son rolled himself over in an abandoned wheelchair, to an empty double seat. I sat down and he laid his head in my lap and we let the intrigue and horror of the program distract us from our own drama. There were real scenes of dismembered bodies wrapped in garbage bags, and sagging mattresses filled with pools of blood. And there were words that made us feel that this could happen to us at any time. That night while my son slept, it also distracted him from having pleasant dreams, and manufactured one of the worst nightmares he’s ever had.

Finally it was our turn to be seen by the doctors. But there was more waiting to be had in the examination rooms. A couple interns and a nurse came by, one by one, and asked us the exact same questions. I guess they wanted to make sure we had our story straight. My son and I whiled away the time by feasting on the basket of dumdum lollipops, and by looking at charts on the wall. I half-joked that the dumdums probably cost $5 a pop, and that even though the nurse said “help yourself they’re free,” the tab from the hospital’s billing department might suggest something different.

My son bounced from wall to wall, hyped up on a major sugar rush. He broke into song and dance over a chart that showed us how not to mistake different kinds of candy with over the counter drugs. The doctors came by and asked “is he always like this?” I guess they wanted to know if he had sustained some kid of head injury.

On the way over to the x-ray room my son admitted to me that the last we were there, he might have faked his limp a little. He’d fallen off the swing set at the park after school and hurt his knee. He said “Mom freaked out so bad I didn’t want her to feel stupid if it was just a bruise.” I laughed and told him he’d have to pay me back the $1200 from his allowance for the next 27 years. The Radiology nurse found that amusing and chimed in “yeah, and in 10 years he’ll have to start paying you back for cancer treatment from the x-rays.”

What the fuck!? Are you kidding me!?!? “Do you really work here or did you sneak in off the streets and through the back door,” I wanted to ask. I wanted to crush her for blurting out something so stupid and so insensitive. Instead, all I had were thoughts that rattled around my brain clothed in baffled anger. The pain those words caused me was the same pain I felt 10-fold, watching my son eat it face first on a lonely wooden ramp.

Just imagining your own child ever being that sick should be enough to make you drop to your knees and blow a kiss to the gods that they’ve only suffered a broken nose. But after already watching my son lay motionless on the ground, and then cry in my arms like a baby, all I could think about was how bad it might look if I wrung that nurse’s neck with my bare hands.

“Motherfucker”, “cock face”, “douche bag”, “bullshit”, “shut the fuck up”, and “son-of-a-bitch” are just a few of the colorful words and phrases I’ve heard my cherub faced son say. He doesn’t say them often, only when the occasion calls for it, but it only takes hearing him say them once to remember them forever.

“Dipshit” is a favorite word of mine, and one that someone called my son once. At first it surprised me that it didn’t seemed to bother him all that much, and he went out of his way to repeat the story to anyone who would listen. He’s usually more sensitive than that, and gets pretty upset when some kid picks on him or calls him names. But when I saw how much joy he got out of saying ‘dipshit’ in his retelling of the story, I realized it made the sadness and the anger of being called one disappear. So who am I to take away from him a harmless source of pleasure.

Some of the stuff my son says comes from watching shows like South Park, and some of it comes from his Grandpa, who spouts out a casual streak of profanity as if they were “ands, ifs and buts.” But most of the horrible things my son has said, he’s learned from me. I admit it; I’m a foul mouthed vulgarian. I love the way a perfectly placed piece of profanity explodes like fireworks, surprising and thrilling equally. I’m not necessarily proud of that fact, but nor do I regret pushing the envelope of what’s considered appropriate for civilized eyes and ears.

When I get mad, righteous, mean or hysterical with laughter, the same words I’ve heard my son say, sputter, tumble and spill out of me. I’ve slammed my thumb with a hammer, and the pained scream that followed, sounded like all of the curse words in the world combined, howled all at once. So I can empathize with my son when a spontaneous outburst of expletives, escape from his mouth. “

Asswipe”, “nutsack”, “dickhead”, “holy crap”, “fucking idiot” and “butt licker” are words and phrases I’ve no doubt taught my son without knowing I was doing so. I know this because they’re words I’ve muttered under my breath that escape from me like little blasts of steam released from an open valve. They are mantras chanted for an inner peace that the kids and the job and the house, threaten to take away every day. I hear people say, “What are you mumbling to yourself?” “Steam,” I tell them, “just letting off steam.”

One of the funniest things I’ve seen since becoming a dad is my son learning how to flip me off, another wonderful thing he inadvertently learned from me. I remember him flipping me off backwards with his middle finger straight up in the air, but the palm of his hand facing me. He was obviously pissed at something I did, as he threw his hand at me like he was casting a spell over me. He shoved his hand in my face and slowly waved his middle finger side to side. Somewhere buried underneath a rushing wave of laughter I knew he should have been scolded for his obscene gesture cast upon me, but my entire energy and focus was spent on stopping myself from laughing in his face.

I really don’t mind when my son curses at home because I know it helps get it out of his system. The only time I ever stop him is when he starts to repeat a new found phrase over and over again, like he’s trying to scratch some tickle in his brain. Other than that he can say what he pleases as long as it comes from his imagination and from his heart, and is absent of any ill-will or hate. All I ask is if he does curse, he does it at home, and he makes me laugh. Well my son is a constant source of amusement with his unique combinations of off-colored words, and the emphatic and passionate way he delivers them. So there’s never been any question about just how funny he can be while being so foul-mouthed. But occasionally he has a problem with keeping the cursing safe at home. He recently walked through a crowded outdoor restaurant and squeezed farts from a whoopee cushion, then broke into a bombastic song about mistaking a fart with shitting in his pants.;

I know my son is just experimenting with what he can and can’t get away with. He’s made a science project out of just how far he can push us. But he only really cuts loose with his foul mouth when he’s pissed or sad or hysterical with laughter, just like me. Sometimes using those words are the only way to really express what he’s feeling. So I let it slide because there’s nothing hurtful behind the words, only humor.

I remember the first time my son cursed. He was three years old and I was giving him a bath. I was telling my son some exaggerated truth that was supposed teach him some lesson, but he called me on it. “That’s Bullshit Dad!!” he yelled as he pulled his face out of soapy bubbles, while a beard and mustache of suds dripped from his chin. He was holding a large rubber duck filled with water, along with a little bit of grime and pee he left behind in the bath. He gave it a good squeeze and squirted the duck’s insides into my eyes, nose and mouth. “That’s bullshit,” he said again, just in case I missed it the first time. 

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