I Vividly Remember The First Time I Swore At My Kid

I didn’t swear in front of my kids for the first 12 years of being a mom. I swore all the time before becoming a mom so this was a deeply meaningful sacrifice on my part. To give up profanity was, at that point, like being asked to give up at least 40% of my vocabulary. How would I convey excitement, fear, fury, love, joy? It felt impossible at first but this was a promise I made to myself. I was young when I became a mom, just 21 years old. I felt like people would expect me to be profane and immature because I was profane and immature. I vowed to hide this from my children for as long as possible by giving up swearing.

I should amend this by saying I gave up intentional swearing or swearing at people. Sure, a few swears slipped out every now and then over the years. A necessary f bomb during rush hour traffic would delight my sons in the back seat, so excited to tell on me… to me. “Mom, you swore!” one would yell and they’d all laugh and laugh. It wasn’t like they didn’t hear any swear words, ever. I couldn’t control every moment of their environment and I certainly didn’t want to. I was happy to send them to school every day, where I knew they’d hear all manner of swearing. I understood this was a part of growing up and secretly believed this would work out to my benefit. My sons would go out into the world hearing bad language and come home to me, an angel. This is exactly the fiction I wanted them to believe. I imagined they would become adult men who would tell their friends, “My mom was such an angel. She never swore, can you imagine? Raising four kids and never swearing.” Wow. Even I’m impressed with this pretend version of me.

I also convinced my sons that some borderline offensive words were high rent swears. Calling someone “fat” for example. There’s never a reason to say this to anyone so I decided it was a swear word. They might believe this to this day. I also convinced them that “shut up” was profanity for a totally different reason. I suspected I would need to say this to one of them one day. And I wanted it to really mean something.

That day came when my oldest son was 12 years old. A quick-witted, funny, irritable kid whose true passion was noticing everything I did wrong, every day and all day. My insides understood he was just a regular 12-year-old kid but my outsides were so sick of being mocked. Did I spill cereal at breakfast? Pathetic. Go over the curb slightly when making a left turn? Moron. Trip and fall on a broken sidewalk? Maybe it was time to have me committed to a care facility. His irritation and criticism was the theme song of my day for weeks and weeks, always in the background under everything. I got used to it. His brothers got used to it. I went to bed at night with all of my faults playing on repeat in my brain. And then suddenly I remembered something. I’m not actually an angel.

I can just tell him to shut up.

I woke up the next morning excited. I could barely wait for him to call me out on something stupid. I almost wanted to make myself trip to trigger his irritation, but no. This precious moment needed to happen organically. The big moment came when we got home from school that day. I tried to help my younger son with his math homework and made some sort of mistake. Something simple that really set my oldest son off on a tangent. I let him gain a little steam, let him rant about me for a few extra seconds. I stood up finally and said as clearly and loudly as I could, “You need to Shut. Up.”

He went silent. His brothers stopped what they were doing. No one moved. He really did just shut up because he didn’t know I would ever tell him to shut up.

Let me tell you, all of those years of censoring my own potty mouth were worth it. That “shut up” was so much more impactful and, I’ll admit it, so much more satisfying because I held my tongue for so long. Telling my son, my sweet and mostly good son, to shut up reminded us both that I was a person in my own right. That he was not invited to openly criticize me – or anyone else – whenever he pleased. It also acted as a delicious little warning to his brothers to edit themselves. They hated that “shut up.” They hated seeing their brother embarrassed and they hated hearing me swear but honestly, I didn’t care. I don’t regret it.

My boys are all men now, and we all swear pretty openly in front of each other. The profanity has lost its edge. But man do I miss the zing of a middle grade swear and the dead silence that follows.

The power of it all. Intoxicating.

Jen McGuire is a contributing writer for Romper and Scary Mommy. She lives in Canada with four boys and teaches life writing workshops where someone cries in every class. When she is not traveling as often as possible, she’s trying to organize pie parties and outdoor karaoke with her neighbors. She will sing Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” at least once, but she’s open to requests.