I worry about my son. I worry about my parenting. Sometimes I think I'm doing okay. Other times I feel a complete failure. It's so hard to protect him from the bad influences of this world. A couple of weeks ago, he translated for me, in sign language fingerspelling, what a video game player was saying in a YouTube video. My son fingerspelled the word "fucking". Yes. My 6 year old spelled that as part of the sentence. I don't even remember the rest of the sentence. I was so stunned by that one word. My boy was smiling because he thought it was very funny. He truly didn't realize this is a word that he is not supposed to know. But he very quickly dropped his smile when I said with a very specific and sharp tone of voice and face expression, "Please repeat that." He knew that wasn't my happy tone and face. He is a clever child. He then repeated the same sentence, BUT this time he wisely dropped the word "fucking" from the sentence. Kid did it so smoothly. Didn't miss a beat. I admit I was impressed at how smoothly he "rewrote" as if it had never happened. I literally facepalmed. I said, "Kid.... That's one of the bad words you are not supposed to know. Just because you know that word, don't use it. I know lots of cuss words, I try very hard to never use them."
I'm very unhappy that he knows that word and he's only 6. But I guess I'm lucky because I learned that word at age 5. My brother who was 4 at the time, learned it too since he was standing right next to me when a very bratty little girl whose parents were clearly not good influences, shouted "Fuck you!" at us because I told her politely that we wanted our tricycle back from her clutches. She took it without our permission and proceeded to ride it for a good 15 minutes with her two cohorts both trying to ride it at the same time by standing on the back of it while she pedaled.
Of course, my brother and I did not actually know what it meant, but from little bratty Jeannie's tone of voice and angry demeanor, we surmised it must be a bad thing to say. I decided to shout back "Fuck you too!" and to my and my brother's utter astonishment, Jeannie was so insulted that she promptly cut off all friendship with us and never again played with us. Funny how people don't like hearing their own words thrown back at them.
But we still didn't understand what was so awful about this word. We looked at each other with puzzlement.
Two days later, we got our answer. A neighbor's female dog, who was in heat, broke loose from her leash while the children were walking her, and promptly started having sex with our German Shepherd who was still chained to the tree in our yard. Our dog was a more than willing participant. The children came into our lawn and shouted at their dog while trying their best to separate her from our dog. My mother came out to see what was the ruckus, and got very mad when she saw what was happening. She tried to help the children get the dogs apart, by tugging on our dog's collar while they tugged on their dog's leash, and also by spraying the dogs with the garden hose. When nothing worked, my mother went back into the house in a terrible, frustrated mood. My brother and I followed her and watched her sit on the kitchen chair, throw her face into her hands, and mumble to herself "....dogs are fucking!" My brother and I immediately looked at each other with realization in our eyes. We had both, at exactly the same time, made the connection of what the word "fuck" meant. We already knew the basics of what sex was (or was the 80's, a much less prudish time). And now we knew there is more than one word to describe the act of having sex. And we also realized it must be a bad word because it made people angry to hear it so we didn't use it though we knew what it meant.
I wonder if my son knows what it actually means. Ugh! How do I protect him from these things, especially when I am deaf and have no clue when a YouTube video is filled with potty language? I tried putting the YouTube account on restricted mode but it keeps undoing that. Very very frustrating. http://replygif.net/i/478.gif
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