What the Fuck

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I were driving home and someone cut us off. It was not
serious but it was jarring. J-man, from the car seat in the back, screamed, “WHAT THE FUCK!” I
turned around to look at him, having not even really heard my husband say it first. J-man looked
at me, and in his most assertive two-and-a-half-year-old tone, he said, “Not nice car. Don’t do
that,” pointing his finger.

He didn’t repeat the phrase again for a couple of weeks. I wasn’t there at the time that he did,
but apparently he and his brother were playing at my mother-in-law’s house, and clear as a
bell he said, “What the fuck!” When my mother-in-law sternly looked at the twelve-year-old and
asked where the baby had learned that, J-man proudly announced, “Daddy said dat.”

The real humour in all of this, for me anyway, is that my husband never swears, and he is
poshly offended when others do. I, however, come from a home and an industry where profanity
is like punctuation. In the early part of our relationship we would fight, and inevitably the fight
would turn into a fight about the fact that I had used some bad word and how dare I direct it at
him. In any event, we worked hard at correcting the phrase and turning it into, “What the heck.”
It seemed to work and we thought J-man had all but forgotten it.

That was until the other night, when we were in the car going to my in-laws’ house to pick
up the twelve-year-old. My husband got a disturbing work email, and in total frustration he
blurted out the dreaded phrase. That was it; it was non-stop and everywhere I went. J-man now
says “WHAT THE Ffff,” and then looks to see our reactions and laughs hysterically.

So what to do? Well, I’ve started telling J-man not to say that bad word. I tell him he can
say “What the heck.” I’m no child psychologist, but he seems to understand what I am saying
to him. My husband thinks that telling him it’s a bad word will only make it worse. He has been
allowing him to say “What the fuck” without reaction, and tells him jokingly, as if it were a game,
that “What the heck” is a bad word. This is the conundrum of co-parenting, and J-man has to be
nothing but confused. I can hear his little mind working: “What the fuck are my parents talking
about? What’s the bad word? I am sooo confused.” All I can say in response is when it comes to
erasing phrases from a two-year-old’s vocabulary — I’m confused too!

-Sleepwalking Mama