The F Word | Cup of Jo

“Do you know the T word, Mommy?” My son asked.

We were standing in the lobby of our apartment building in the early morning light. I sighed, silently praying for his school bus to hurry up and careen around the corner to put an end to the conversation.

“Do you know that one, Mommy?”

“Nope.” I yawned. “What’s the T word?”

Our lobby door swung open, and a neighbor squeezed past us with his poodle.

“Twat!” My son shouted proudly.

The neighbor frowned, while the poodle gave a small ruff! Perhaps of disapproval. All I knew was that I was trying to suppress my own bark of laughter.

“What about the Z word, Mommy? Do you know that one?”

I breathed a sigh of relief as his school bus finally lurched to a stop outside, not wanting to even guess what the Z word might be.

My kid is currently fascinated by curse words. He is 12, what I recall as being the Dawn of the Great Curse Word Awakening. I, too, had been fascinated by “bad words” at his age and have vivid memories of strutting through the mall with my friends, launching F bombs next to the Bath & Body Works bath bombs. (Holy sh*t, that Waikiki Beach Coconut smelled f*cking good!)

So, I know his interest in profanity is all quite typical behavior. However, my son is not neurotypical — he has autism, which adds another layer of parental navigation to the problem. Is he simply exploring language? Examining emotions? Or just being a dumpster-mouthed child? It’s hard to know, and my husband and I are struggling with how to deal with it. We know we don’t want to respond the way our parents did, where the utterance of a cuss was on par with purposely putting your boot through the TV screen. Expletives were an outrage in our Catholic homes, not to be tolerated. I can recall one time as a teenager, coming downstairs to find my mother standing sternly over my youngest brother, Greg. He was about nine and sat at the table with a tear-streaked face. I asked what had happened, and my mom thrust a tiny scrap of paper at me.

“A teacher found this on the playground! Your brother had shoved it through a hole in the fence! Can you believe it?”

I peered down at the paper. My brother’s carefully formed consonants and vowels read: “Gregg Gohmann. Fuck.”

Upon reading it, I had to work very hard to arrange my facial features into something equally outraged, and not let them fall into hysterical laughter, which of course is what my face wanted to do.

Could I believe it? I most certainly could.

To be fair, I get why my parents took such a hard line on cursing. Not only were they religious, but they were raising eight very loud and rambunctious children, and I’m sure they felt like if they didn’t draw a line in the sand our home would sound like a convention of sailors. I don’t blame them for not wanting dinnertime to sound like Fleet Week. And yet, I also saw how their approach completely backfired.

These days, I can control my cursing with ease, turning it on and off like a (filthy) mental spigot. I have never accidentally uttered a swear word in front of my mother. Not even the time I saw my older brother concuss his head on a low ceiling while dancing to The Pointer Sisters. (Yes, the song was “Jump.”) And other than when I bang my kneecaps on our bedframe or hear the latest from the White House, I strive not to curse in front of my son. My husband would no doubt arch an eyebrow at this description of my wholesome vocabulary, but he isn’t exactly Mr. Rogers himself. The only difference is he’s from Northern Ireland, so his swearing sounds less like a cuss and more like he’s angrily quoting Yeats. Plus, even when I do “slip,” my son immediately calls me on it, and I am quick to apologize, treating it as a sort of verbal flatulence. I offer a polite, “Oh, excuse me!”

But it matters not. Our kid is now in adolescence, and just like me at that age, he seems to be experimenting with sounding like he is long-hauling a semi across Ohio. So far, our response has been to calmly remind him that cursing is impolite and offensive to some. To which he then responds by releasing a string of expletives, pausing after each one to inquire about its precise level of offensiveness.

I do think that for my son, a large part of his interest is in why words elicit the response that they do. With autism, so much of his daily experience is about parsing out reactions — all the whys and what fors of the human emotional spectrum. Discouraging this can feel complicated, even when we know it’s necessary for engaging with polite society.

He also just genuinely enjoys words — the more unusual the better — which is something I am grateful for. When he was very small, he struggled to learn to speak. With the help of speech therapy, the words finally came, and every bit of babble felt like a precious little gemstone in my pocket. Combine all of this with the fact that I am a writer who is also fascinated by the quiet sorcery of well-chosen words, and my reaction to his cursing could be described as unruffled at best, negligent at worst. One thing is certain, my attempt to take a “isn’t language fascinating!” approach and not recreate the raining hellfire fears of my youth — yeah, that isn’t really working. For it’s a bit hard to frame him yelling “shit!” next to the CVS nurse giving him his flu shot as a mere fondness for the miracle of communication.

That said, there are studies showing that cursing actually helps with pain tolerance. Furthermore, there are studies (I am very fond of citing studies when I feel like I’m whiffing it as a parent) that show that cursing can be a sign of integrity and honesty. So there, assholes!

Psychologist Timothy Jay is an “expert in swearing” (join the club, Tim), and he believes there are many upsides to cursing. “A lot of times you don’t get to the argument about the positive uses of these [words],” he said in an interview on children and profanity. “Their use in humor, their use in bonding, their use as a relief from pain or venting or frustration — I look at this as an evolutionary advantage.”

How about that! “Shithead” as evolutionary advantage!

Though in the very same article, Dr. Jay reminds us that it’s the parents’ job to teach their child the nuance and etiquette of language. Which, of course, is true. But let’s be real, sometimes that job can feel like putting a sweater on a cat while drunk and underwater. It’s tricky!

As with many things with our son, it will likely just take some thinking outside the box and some time to grow up. And really, if I am fully honest, I must admit that part of me feels a tiny twinge of happiness that he has reached this “milestone” of sorts. Parents of children with disabilities tend to delight in every step of development, both the good and the garbage.

The other night, while I watched my son quietly text his friend “dammit,” I spied his mischievous smile, and found myself thinking of my youngest brother and him pushing that paper through the fence all those years ago. While the nun who discovered it may have declared it profane, really, what that little scrap was, was a mini, one-word declaration of independence. Just as I think cursing can be for many kids. Their little way of trying on power. Of seeing what a bit of rebellion feels like rolling around in their gap-toothed mouths. For the F word, in all its myriad meanings, can mean something entirely different to children: a bit of Freedom.

Johanna Gohmann lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and a betta fish named Bissell. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and The Wall Street Journal, and she is the author of the forthcoming humor book, All Toddlers Are Scorpios: An Astrological Guide to Your Adorable Tiny Terror.

P.S. What it feels like to have autism.

(Photo by Kelly Knox/Stocksy.)