The Sacrifices We Make

As soon as I realized I was pregnant, I told The Scientist, “Oh #&$@! I have to stop swearing.”

This is harder than it sounds. Somewhere in the first thirty years of my life, I developed the mouth of a sailor. A pissed-off, creative sailor. It just came naturally. There’s a rhythm in long strings of swear words that irresistible; the syllables roll off your tongue like sweet, sweet grape Kool-Aid.

I swore quite a bit in casual conversation, but it got really impressive when I played video games. There’s something about mushrooms with feet and pastel ghosts that just makes me want to insult them in the worst language possible. It helps that they’re little two-dimensional dudes and they can’t turn around and punch you in the face when you tell them to go %!@* themselves.

My favorite targets were the hapless half-demons of Mortal Kombat. One day, twelve weeks pregnant and beating the living crap out of Johnny Cage, I had a sudden premonition of my kid’s preschool years.

Teacher: “Sweetie, why did you call Billy a donkey-punching, pig-%$#@ing piece of *(&^$ &$#%sucker?”

My Kid: “My mom called Subzero that when she was playing Mortal Kombat.”

And that was when I became determined to quit for good.

I’m doing okay so far. I manage to confine the majority of my profanity to times when Khan is asleep and to e-mail (I can’t swear in my Facebook status updates because I am Facebook friends with both my mom and my mother-in-law; yeah, I knew that would come back to bite me someday).

Then, the other night, The Scientist made a comment that led me to realize I have a lot more work ahead of me. He said, astutely, that someday we’d see Lindsay Lohan ‘spit out by the bottom of the porn industry.”

Oh crap. We make a lot of comments that, while not overtly profane, refer to activities of a salacious nature. Things Khan won’t know about until he’s at least ten: sex, drugs, and Inside Edition. We have to cut the allusions to South Park and Mitch Hedburg. At least until Khan is old enough to sneak around and watch these videos behind our backs.

Man, being a parent is rougher than I ever expected. $%@#.