One December Sunday several years ago, I’d just returned home to my petite Victorian house in the pitch black early evening. As I walked through newly painted rooms, turning on lamps, I talked on the phone with this really nice, handsome and interesting guy.
We’d seen each other a few times. So far, he was everything on my wish list.
I was smitten, excited and optimistic — just didn’t want to get my hopes up.
Then he said: “Oh my goodness gracious!”
I froze. They were words I’d not heard in a long time. They seemed old-fashioned, and made me nervous.
Mike seemed about as straight-laced a gentleman as they come, and so very wholesome. (Still is.)
Maybe too straight-laced.
I’d wanted to be sure that whoever disrupted my newly single and creative life was worth the trouble.
But suddenly I worried about whether I was good enough for him. I trusted my loving heart, honesty and effort to do good.
Yet, I have plenty of bad habits, too — like my potty mouth.
B&G is an Aspiration
A quick reminder: For me, Blessed & Grateful is a practice, a personal goal, an outlook and aspiration.
No magic answers here, folks. Just a writer telling stories about what I’ve learned (some) and what I’m still learning (a lot), on my ride around the sun on this beautiful rock.
I am neither pure, nor holier-than-thou. We all have our stuff we’re working on.
Here’s one of mine: I’m kinda mouthy, often with colorful language. Actually, to say I can swear like a sailor and talk like a trucker may insult sailors and truckers.
By 40, I’d of course heard plenty of salty language. I believe in free speech, free press and as such am anti-censorship. I was smart enough to be careful and appropriate around children, or in professional or office settings.
But otherwise, I had no big reasons to censor myself.
Still Tweaking
In the months before I met Mr. Goodness Gracious my parents started making comments. First, one from Dad.
Unfortunately, he died in 2013 and is not here to defend himself. Anyone who knew him would say calling his language “colorful” was an understatement.
He had a good heart, and struggled with his flaws as we all do. He loved us.
And he had many four-letter favorites.
As a kid, I was puzzled that he’d call his own dad an “old fart” and nobody seemed to mind. I could not imagine anyone on my mom’s side of the family referring to her father that way.
As an adult, when we talked on the phone and I asked him what he was doing, he’d say: “dilly-farting around.” Or, if he wanted to describe someone who was all over the place he’d say: “That guy — he’s like a wet fart in a hot skillet.”
The cussing king often got exactly the reaction he was after: I’d roll my eyes, scold him and chuckle all at the same time.
So maybe I swore trying to be funny like my Dad, or just to blow off stress, or I was just being lazy. Who knows.
One summer day, Dad and I were working hard to bust up a stubborn block of concrete outside my little house in a small town in central Pennsylvania.
That concrete had to go, and it would not budge.
We were building a series of outdoor steps beside the house, a way to reach the backyard without going through the house, which sits atop a hill on a narrow lot. Dad had figured out the dimensions of each step in this strange and quirky, descending walkway of various and funky widths.
To make the whole thing work, that concrete had be broken into pieces. No way around it.
It was 90-some degrees on a muggy afternoon. I pounded and pounded with a sledge hammer. Dad was still recovering from a serious illness and probably should have been inside in front of an air conditioner, instead of supervising.
So it was me and my sledge hammer vs. that concrete.
I doubled-down, pounded away and swore a blue streak at it.
This seemed useful — eventually, enough concrete gave way and broke off. I was pleased.
Dad-isms
Turns out my Dad, of all people, was shocked.
Dad: Where did you learn to talk like that?
Me: Um … you. (True.)
Then he called my mom. They’d been divorced more than 30 years by then, but he still had this thing about tattling on me to my mom.
Dad: Do you have any idea how much your daughter swears? Where did she get that from?
Mom: You.
The next spring, my mom and I escaped the cold north for a few days in Florida. Once seated on the airplane for our return flight, she lectured me to clean up my mouth.
Mom: Do you realize how much you just swore while we were waiting at the gate? I was EMBARRASSED!
Actually, I had no idea. Still none when we stepped out of the Cleveland airport into the bitter, painful cold and I strung profane words together to make new phrases.
My point: It was pretty bad, and I barely realized it.
And then, by some incredible and unbelievable stroke of luck that fall, I met my husband.
Sticking to the Script
And his kids!
Soon after the conversation with Mr. Goodness Gracious I met his boys — 15 and 13.
See — I’d wanted a family of my own, and at 41 it had not yet happened.
So here was a shot at making a new family with these three guys. I was determined to do everything as right as I possibly could, to be the very best example I could be from the start.
As we got to know each other, I chose my words carefully and stuck to safe things to say to these wholesome, smart, country kids and athletes.
Like: Great game!
Sometimes I repeated the same, boring thing.
But it was better than … well, you know.
I was so nervous about making good initial impressions, so aware that certain moments would stick in their minds, the way I remembered the first times I’d spent as a child with my stepmother.
I was so eager. So anxious. So careful.
I positioned myself in the corner of the kitchen between the sink and cutting board and got busy cooking and feeding them. I like to cook. They like to eat. We built from there.
The Swear Jar
The best I can recall is that something went off the rails with preparing a meal — like I was already into it then realized I was missing an important ingredient — or opened the refrigerator door too quickly, sending some condiment tumbling from a poorly designed shelf on the door onto the floor, triggering a panic about a further delay and mess to cleanup.
Oh crap!
In a moment when my guard was down only a tame little word like that flew from my mouth. Before I could finish patting myself on the back ….
That’s a swear word! said my younger stepson. You owe the swear jar!
Oh honey, I thought, you have NO IDEA.
And so, over the years, as we became a family, this became one of our family jokes.
In time, they could read moments of surprise, shock and horror on my face and smirked with anticipation over whether I’d screw up or hold my tongue. They were testing and teasing.
My younger stepson, the peanut butter prankster, was especially good at popping up out of nowhere.
He had a spidey-sense for a key, high-risk moment of weakness and would pop into a room at just the right time to interject a reminder:
Swear jar!
Disputed Balance Due
When that big bottle of A-1 sauce flew out of the refrigerator door and landed squarely on my barefoot big toe, I said “Don’t swear. Don’t swear. Don’t swear” over and over again until the pain passed.
Sometimes I slipped. Of course I slipped.
Over the more than five years since I moved into the Man Cave with my husband and stepsons, I can count on one hand — okay, maybe two — the number of times I truly said a four-letter word, and owed the swear jar.
Never the bomb, mind you. Never.
Even if it’s all the fingers on two hands, that’s $2.50.
Both kids have joked that I owe the swear jar about $1,000. No way.
And so it goes.
Here’s the thing: There is no swear jar. There never was an actual jar, or actual payments of actual money.
We never needed it. It wasn’t about the money. It was, of course, about the three of them and being the best I could for them.
Now I Notice — and Cringe
Those boys — simply by being children of the love of my life, and in time our children — made me want to be better, my absolute very best, a good example for them and someone they deserved in their home and lives.
Still a work in progress.
Now, I hear those George Carlin bad words and cringe — whether they’re coming out of my mouth or someone else’s. The kids are 22 and 19. By now, they’ve heard it all.
I’m no saint. I still swear — generally when the kids are not around and I’m venting to my husband or a girlfriend.
But I do hear it now, and shudder. I try to dial it down, calm down, apologize, clean it up and do better.
Last week, I finally got to share the movie Bull Durham with my older stepson. I’d been looking forward to it for years, waiting until he was “old enough.” We all love baseball, and I knew he’d like the parts when the seasoned catcher teaches the rookie pitcher a lesson about not shaking off the catcher’s signs.
You never shake off the catcher. Both our boys played catcher for many seasons.
But I forgot about how much crude language is in that movie. I just had not noticed before.
Every bomb was uncomfortable. Even though he is 22, about to graduate college, plenty old enough to watch whatever rated movie he wants to and has surely heard his own share of salty language, I still felt like a bad influence.
Stopping the movie felt weird. Watching it felt weird. So I pulled the blanket over my head in-between the baseball scenes (for the cuss words and other reasons.)
These three men have changed me. Loving them and living with them has changed me. They have made me better — nowhere near perfect, but better — and I’m grateful for their inspiration.
Now, most of the time, when I’m shocked, and say “Oh my …” I linger for a moment, and more often than not, choose “goodness.”