Swearing Off Swearing

Well, it finally happened. After close to four years as my daughter, Lucy recently decided to, for the first time, quote me verbatim seconds after she overheard an from my lips.

Her inaugural potty-mouthed moment came last Thursday night, when my husband and I were going on a date and I was throwing together a quick and of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. The latter came out of the microwave piping hot and gooey in a floppy cardboard pan. The pan bent as I was taking it from the , causing some of its contents to gloop onto the stovetop and a nearby pile of mail.

This culinary collapse prompted me to breathlessly and thoughtlessly utter a combination of three swear words beginning with the letters S, D and F. The last word was a colorful twist on the f-bomb, with an “uckity-uck” flourish at the end that I know I picked up from a classic scene from a first-season episode of “The Wire.”

Sadly, this tripartite expletive was music to my young daughter’s ears. She giggled and quickly repeated every last syllable. My husband stifled a laugh and I slapped my forehead and . And then that was it. Knock on wood, she hasn’t said it again – and neither have I. We didn’t make a big deal out of it, because everyone says that if you do call attention to that moment, the kid will realized that she’s found a great button-pusher/attention-getter and will start to swear like a sailor.

If that happens, it would only be karma coming back to get me. You see, I myself swore with great frequency when I was my daughter’s age, thanks to my dad  who could go toe-to-toe in  a creative swearing contest with Ralphie’s dad from “A Christmas Story.”

Given this legacy, of course I have tried my best to curb my swearing around Lucy because she hears everything, remembers everything and repeats everything. Now that she has one of my verbal gems on file, all I can do is wait for the inevitable @#%$&*! shoe to drop.