Recently an elderly woman came up to me in the health food store and said, "I read your book."
"Oh?" I said politely, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
She went on to say, quite disapprovingly, "I did not appreciate the bad language one bit."
It's true that Grace River has a lot of swearing in it. It kind of has to. It's told from the perspective of four different people, and two of them are male smelter workers. It would have been weird if they didn't swear.
My ten-year-old daughter has asked me many times when she gets to read the book. "When you're twenty-five," I say.
"But WHY?" she asks. I tell her it's the language. That's not entirely true, but let's just go with that.
That excuse probably makes her want to read it even more. My kids are fascinated with swearing. They hear it all the time on the playground at school, and although I'm pretty careful around them they have definitely heard adults use "bad" words.
But I have also told them many times that swear words are just words. The important thing for them to learn is when it's appropriate to use them, which for a kid is pretty much...never.
However, little J, my seven-year-old, decided a while ago that he wanted to write songs. He politely asked me if I minded if he used swear words in them. I thought about it and decided that I didn't really mind at all. I told him they were his songs and he could write anything he wanted.
He went on a songwriting frenzy, filling up page after page of his giant blue notebook. He showed them to me proudly, most of the words spelled out phonetically (taking into account his adorable lisp) and in brightly coloured marker. The result was sort of half Patsy Cline and half Rage Against the Machine: "Oh, you bwoke my hart, you f**ker. Dont evr bwake it agin..."
Who was I to judge? I told him he could write whatever he wanted and I meant it. But I don't think I'll be letting him perform his songs for the grandparents at Sunday dinner anytime soon.
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Hi there. I saw your blog on She Writes, and now have it on my Google Reader.
ReplyDeleteI love this piece. My son is only a year and a half old, but my husband and I have talked a lot about whether or not to editor our language around him as he grows up, whether to let him swear or not, etc. - all the things you mentioned here. And I think it's wonderful that you let your son use swear words in his songs.
It's such a fine line, I think. We don't want to edit ourselves in front of our kid(s), and we don't want to censor our child(ren), but at the same time my husband and I want to make it clear that using certain, specific words makes others think less of you, and shows a blatant lack of respect for oneself and for whomever one is speaking to. We'll see how well we stick with this philosophy once our son starts calling us "motherf***ing a**holes" or something!
Thanks for reading, Meredith!
ReplyDeleteIt is a fine line. I think you're absolutely right to want to stress to your kid that people will look at you a certain way if you use words that make them uncomfortable. We all have to edit ourselves sometimes, even if it's just learning not to call our parents bad names!
They'll figure it out. I hope.