Some People Have to Learn the Hard Way

                My son, Adam, once initiated a freestyle lesson in Spanish.  He was about six, so the lesson consisted of him asking me to translate various words from Spanish into English for him. A big problem with the lesson—indeed a major flaw in this whole thing—was that he didn’t exactly “know” any words in the Spanish.  He knew quite a bit of gibberish, but I still tried to help him as best as I could.

                “What does ‘fasololo’ mean in Spanish?” he asked.  Now, let me be honest for a moment, I don’t remember the exact words in gibberish that he wanted translated from Spanish to English—or the translations I provided him—but that shit isn’t important.  I was laying down some classic, dad-level bullshit.

“’Fasololo?’ That means ‘table’ in Spanish.”

He asked me a couple others, like “dongo” and “wakookie.”  I gave him answers.  “That means ‘coat rack,’” and “That’s how you tell a girl she’s pretty.”  There was a bunch of stuff like that.

Now, I’m not sure why he thought I knew Spanish.  I had just graduated from college with a minor concentration in French, and he knew that I’d been doing French homework for a while.  I had probably told him that I’d taken some Spanish in high school, but I certainly don’t remember much of that.  I could have taught him how to say, “Como se dice ‘fankobabi’ en Español?”  But I didn’t.  I really failed that kid on the whole Spanish thing.

But, anyway, as our little Spanish lesson was running its course, he asked me what “kobubo”—or something like that—meant in Spanish.  I replied, “Oh, my goodness! Don’t ever say that again!  That’s a really bad word.”

“What does it mean?” he asked.  I really had his attention.  Adam has always had an affinity for foul language, and this was quite a tease for him.  I did not relent, so he never found out what it meant, because it was gibberish, of course, and I was making this stuff up as the conversation progressed.

However, for context, let’s just say that “kobubo” means “fuck your mother” in the Spanish I was making up for Adam.  See what I’m saying?  That’s a really bad thing to say.  I did the right thing not teaching that to a six-year-old.  I stand by this.

Now, when I first thought of writing about this impromptu Spanish lesson, I wanted to tie it in with the time Adam learned to use the proverbial “C-word.”  Don’t worry.  It was pretty funny, and, heads-up, I’m going to be dropping the “C-word” on you in a bit.  But I wanted to tie the two episodes together by using the Spanish lesson as an example of a time when I told Adam not to use a word because it was bad, but he didn’t learn to follow my advice.

But that wasn’t the lesson at all.  Indeed, if Adam learned anything from the Spanish lesson, it was that I’m not 100% trustworthy.  I mean, now, as an adult, he has an appreciation for the fine art of bullshitry, but when he was a few months shy of eleven—at the time of the C-word incident—so he was still a pretty concrete thinker.  And my word, perhaps, was rather dubious.

Now, about that C-word.

For about six years during my marriage, we lived a couple blocks from the high school in Old Town, Maine.  During the summer, the high school pool was open to the public.  The kids, especially Adam, were huge fans of going to the pool.

He loved to swim, and he pushed himself to master the skills he needed to have access to the deep end and the diving boards.  He would have spent his entire day there if he could some days.  For a while, my ex-wife, Kathy, and I wouldn’t let him go without his older sisters.  We didn’t necessarily expect them to “supervise” him, but we did expect a full report.  Now, we realized that his older sisters weren’t going to tell us everything.  Kathy and I had both been kids before, but looking back, we at least subconsciously knew that Krystal and Kasi, our older two daughters, had a relatively low threshold for embarrassment, and we’d at least hear about a lot of Adam’s actions that embarrassed them, if not everything he did.

Ultimately, he was able to go alone.  We may have caved in a little for him.  He was so, so consistently persistent about wanting to go to the pool on his own, and the girls didn’t always want to go.  They were about thirteen and fourteen at the time, and they had lives to live.  We felt that this was safe for Adam to do there in small town, Maine.  Besides—and now that I think of it, as this was the summer before he turned eleven, the summer when I was unemployed and trying to focus on the ol’ job search—I could always go up and check on him, and I often did. 

I’d usually walk up to the pool, oh, every other time or so, and I’d see how he was doing.  The lifeguards liked him, because he was—and still is—really funny.  I’d check in with them and make my presence known to him, and I’d walk home.  What an idyllic life we led in those days, kids going swimming while mom worked and ol’ Ted desperately searched for worked before the unemployment ran out.  Ah, yes, these were pretty good days, indeed, the unemployment notwithstanding.

Until. . .

One Friday evening, Adam had gone to the pool for the couple hours it was open after dinner, and I went to check on him.  His older sisters certainly weren’t going to watch over and report on him, for they were having a sleepover with a couple of their friends.  And young Amber was home tagging along with her older sisters.  The girls were probably planning a fashion or talent show—as they often did.  What a glorious, fun-filled evening of family time we had ahead of us.

Now, I’m not sure exactly what prompted me to go see what Adam was up to, but I’m willing to bet that it was Kathy.  She always had—and still has—a pretty amazing intuition when it comes to the kids.  She and I have been divorced for five years, but if she tells me that she has a gut-feeling that something may be going amiss with the kids, I believe her.  Still.  She probably just said something like, “Why don’t you go check on Adam,”  while she was in the living room with the girls as they planned their talent show or painted each other’s nails or whatever girl stuff they had planned.  I don’t really remember what they were all doing.  I just remember that their lives were about to change. 

So, I walked up to the high school, a very short walk from what we all refer to as the “white house,” a reference not just to where we lived but to a period in our time together as a family.  From our driveway we could see part of the high school parking lot, and I walked the hundred-or-so yards there.

I had made it to the parking lot when I first heard it.  “Ice cream cunt!”  I recognized the voice immediately.  Adam has a pretty distinctive voice, and I could pick it out of the crowd of boys on the patio area outside the pool.  Oh, but I could hear him.  Adam can, shall we say, project.  I heard “Ice cream cunt!” a few more times as I sped up my approach.  And, yes, those were the exact words.

The Old Town High School pool has been the home of a number of state championship swim teams over the years.  The banners were proudly displayed in the gym, and the school records were displayed above the bleachers by the pool.   And just outside, on a fenced-in patio area, my son shouted, “Ice cream cunt!” so close to where so many champions had so nobly represented good ol’ Old Town High.

“Ice cream cunt!” Adam yelled.

I had cut across the grass in the most direct route, as soon as I’d recognized the voice.  I could see him surrounded by teenagers, who, for their own amusement, were clearly prompting him.  When I got close enough that he noticed me—and perhaps my expression—he stopped.  “Adam,” I said, “Get your stuff.”

He stopped yelling it, and the peckerhead teenage boys who had been just moments prior encouraging him, well, I don’t remember too clearly what they did next, besides disperse.  I vaguely remember what was probably a few “uh-oh” looks on their faces along with a few smirks.  I don’t remember saying anything to them, but I may have.  I do remember staring daggers at them. 

And Adam and I walked home.  Our conversation was rather cyclical.

“I don’t know what ‘cunt’ means!” Adam would say, pleading with me.  And, retrospectively, I must give him credit for his honesty.  He did not, at that time, know what ‘cunt’ means.

“Look,” I’d reply, “You can’t say that.  It’s a bad word.”

“But I don’t know what ‘cunt’ means!”

And that was no lie.  The kid had integrity, and I’d like to give him credit for that now, for I could not, then.  “It’s just a really bad word. You don’t ever want to say it, especially in front of your mom or sisters.  Just don’t”

“But I don’t know what ‘cunt’ means!”

And around we went, for all those couple-hundred yards that we walked home.  And Adam has what you might call “voice modulation issues.”  That kid’s voice carried.  He is and always has been an animated and gregarious presence, and he’s always fun to be around.  He’s really funny.  But as I think about him and his lively presence, I can’t help but think about how that conversation played in the neighborhood.   I mean, sure, Adam has heard me yell, a lot, maybe more than anyone else in the world, but I usually tried not to broadcast my displeasure all that publicly.  So, on that summer night, these many years ago, I imagine that anyone in their living rooms or sitting on their back decks or even anywhere near an open window along that street, I imagine they heard that succession of Adam yelling, “But I don’t know what ‘cunt’ means!” with pauses in between when I would quietly plead with him not to say that word.

That word.  The “C-word.”  Cunt.  Let’s talk about “cunt” for a moment.  “Cunt,” that most profane and dreaded synecdoche.  Most people, especially the women-folk, aren’t big fans of it.  Some people just don’t care.  Some people just use it to push a button.  Like any profanity, it carries a certain amount of weight—“fuck it” expresses so much more frustration than “damn it.”  “Cunt” is a heavy one, indeed.    Motherfucker, bitch, cocksucker, cunt, asshole, these words are not meant for polite society or for my gentlemanly conversations.

I do use these words, though.  I don’t really use cunt so much but it has come up in conversations of mine recently, most recently by a woman who was doing some serious venting.  There’s nothing like a nice string of profanities, punctuated with a “cunt,” to let some steam off.  I do it all the time—again, not punctuated with a “cunt”—and often at work.  I mean, I mostly do it under my breath at work, but many times, I’m sure, it can be heard in neighboring cubicles.

And where did I learn this foul language?  A few, I learned when my parents let them slip in front of me.  Most of us learn a few of them that way.  Some, I learned in movies.  I was eleven-or-so when my family first got HBO.  “Cunt”, along with a few others, I learned from my dear brothers.  They were three and eight years older than I, and I often tagged along with them around the house.  I learned a lot from my brothers, a lot of “what not to do” kind of stuff.  If nothing else, I learned the value of discretion.  This lesson served me well in my high school years. 

Early on, I thought “cunt” was merely a naughty way to refer to a lady’s vagina.  As the years passed, I learned that a lady might not like the use of the word “cunt,” especially when it is used metonymously.  I did not have to learn this first hand, but I’m not sure where I learned it, probably the movies.  That’s where normal people learn dirty stuff.  Isn’t it?  I also may have learned it by watching friends make the mistake the mistake of using it.  Lesson learned.

Adam, on the other hand, didn’t always learn from the examples set by others or from a parent telling him not to do something.  Perhaps it’s part of his charm, but Adam, unfortunately, had to learn the hard way.  Ah, the perils of being an almost purely experiential learner.  I tried to tell him.  I honestly did.  That “I don’t know what ‘cunt’ means” conversation, that happened.  Just don’t say that word!  Not good enough for my Adam.

Could I have just told him that “cunt” is what “kobubo” means in English?  Perhaps, but for starters, I’m pretty sure Adam wouldn’t have remembered any of the words from the informal Spanish lesson.  Also, that would have been a lie.  We’ve established that “kobubo” means “fuck your mother,” not “cunt.”  And after the whole gibberish from Spanish to English lesson situation, I couldn’t risk another blow to my integrity with Adam.

Now, should I have told him that “cunt” is a slang term for “vagina” that we just shouldn’t use?  In the moment, that seemed like the worst idea, ever, but perhaps just telling Adam what a cunt is might have prevented what I now recall as the most embarrassing part of the whole “Adam learns the word ‘cunt’” episode.  He may have learned the dirty secret of what the word means, but the spread of the word may have been limited, at least on my watch.

And there we were, Adam and me, back from the pool.  Our “I don’t know what ‘cunt’ means” conversation had not, exactly, come to a resolution, other than me hoping, desperately, that he wouldn’t use the word again.

We got to the house, where the girls were probably in the middle of their fashion show.  My memory of what Adam and I walked into isn’t really clear.  I just know that Kathy could easily tell that something had happened, partly because she just knows stuff like that—it can be creepy—and partly, obviously, because Adam was home with me well before the pool closed.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Some teenagers were egging Adam on to shout something he shouldn’t be saying when I walked up there,” I replied.  “I’ve been trying to talk to him about it on the walk home.”

“What did he say?”

“He was using the ‘C-word,” I said.

“But I don’t know what ‘cunt’ means!” Adam blurted out.

And again, he did not.  Indeed, he did not.

Kathy, for her part, was not exactly pleased with this turn of events, and she was in Adam’s face with a very loud, “Don’t you ever say that again!”  Adam may just get his voice modulation

Adam and Amber, a couple years
 after the "episode."

issues from his mother.

Looking back, I now have to assume that this is when my daughter’s learned the word “cunt,” along with their two friends.  I don’t remember a conversation with their parents the next day about my son introducing their daughters to the word “cunt.”  The aftermath of the “cunt” episode hasn’t really seared itself into my memory the same way the event, itself, did.

One thing I do know is that as I’ve been thinking about this situation, I felt like I had let Adam down.  Could I have prevented this incident by explaining to him that those weren’t Spanish words that he wanted me to translate into English?  Probably not.   And I surely would have regretted not making up English translation to his gibberish terms.  That was an opportunity of a lifetime.

On the other hand, could I have just been a little more understanding with him?  I could have just stopped on the walk home, gone to one knee to be on his level, and looked him in the eyes with my hands on his shoulders and said, “Adam, please don’t use that word.  I can’t tell you what it means right now.  It’s just a bad word.  I never say it, and those guys were jerks for teaching it to you.  Let’s just leave it behind us.”  I sure could have said that.

Hindsight being what it is, I could have done a lot of things different, but the question remains.  Would anything I might have done stopped Adam from using that word in front of my daughters and their friends?  Probably not.  Adam, he learns from experience.

When we first moved into the white house, after having been on the first floor of a duplex for a while, Adam tried a little experiment with the stairs.  He was living full time in a house with stairs, and even though he’d been in plenty of houses with stairs, he had to try something.   On a quiet afternoon soon after our move, Kathy and I were sitting in the living room when we heard a crash and an “Ugh, that hurt.”  We rushed into the hall to see Adam at the bottom of the stairs.  He had jumped from the top to see what it was like.  He was okay, but he’d learned his lesson. 

Now, let me ask you, do you think that there’s anything I could have said to prevent the kid who jumped down a flight of stairs “to see what it was like” from saying “cunt” in front of his sisters and their friends?  Me neither.  You see, Adam, Ol’ Adam, he had to learn things the hard way