Archive for the ‘Talking To Baby’ Category
TALKING TO BABY
Posted 06.15.08 by annajohnson
DO AS I SAY, BUT DON’T SAY THAT
The first time a baby says a bad word, mothers pretend to be shocked. One fine summer evening my son said “bullshit”. At fifteen months, he repeated the words he heard the second he heard them. Cat. Dog. Moon. Apple. Ball. Bullshit.
In a way, I was amazed it wasn’t something worse. I swear like a crazed Irish convict when I’m stressed, I pollute the air with even more vulgarity when I’m cross, and sometimes I even swear for joy, another very Irish trait. But when the BS term fell from those rosebud lips, the penny dropped. Who we are is what they will become, so we had better be our best selves. Their purity is our guide. Now this sounds horribly moralistic—staunch, even. But when it comes to babies, I think there is a place for high-minded starch, and sweet rather than sour words. They can speak dialect or even rap gibberish, one day but first they need to learn the most elevated version of their language we possess.
Talking with some self-awareness around little ones can suddenly make one see how we tend to waste words and indeed how much most adults repeat themselves. We accuse children of being stuck records but honestly adults are much more Boring. Parents bicker according to their ancient ragged script. The tired Mom whines as if on autopilot. The old friends bitch and gossip, toddlers in laps, oblivious to the ugliness of their bravado and mock sophistication. Words are little golden trophies to the people who first speak them, grasping them with a lilting stutter or lisp. “Yes?” my son asks gently. “No!” he scolds forcefully, trying each word on for size and effect. Not quite connecting the name to the emotion or the word to the meaning, he totters through a world not yet clearly labeled. For him, the moon is a ball, a button and a balloon, and any of those words might do. And of course language is only partly a matter of explanation. Behind each new word is a complex history of social laws, etiquette, emotion and culture. In his hands are the clumsy new tools for illumination, contact, exhilaration or, potentially, shame.
I should know bout this issue of profanity, I grew up in New York. At the tender age of seven the Puerto Rican girls on the corner got me in an enormous amount of trouble, as I was only to happy to tell them the meaning of the word sex was “two people screwing in a bed.” I had been so proud to connect the noun to the verb. Sex was a doing word! Needless to say I was banned in every family house on 21st between Seventh and Eighth Avenue bearing a silk-screened poster of Jesus at the Last Supper. I not only said a bad word; I connected it to an even more outrageous visual concept. This was my first real lesson in the power of words to explain, impress and alienate at the same time. “Why,” I asked my mother through a flood of gluey tears, “is a word bad if it’s actually true?” I had grown up listening to the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin and assiduously studied the work of Robert Crumb in a wide range of hippie households so why all the fuss? “Choose your audience,” my Mother said wisely. “Everyone speaks English but that doesn’t mean they speak the same language.” Mum also swore like a trooper. Or a poet, depending on who you read.
Joyce or Shakespeare demonstrate very elegantly that there are in fact no bad words; merely bad contexts for them. A profane word used judiciously and very rarely has a dramatic impact and possibly even a comic flair. Who could forget Audrey Hepburn screaming “Move your bleedin’ arse!” at Ascot in “My Fair Lady?” It was so shocking, it was so charming and all because of the context. One could almost get away with such an outrage to class, dressed in a lace gown and a picture hat designed by Cecil Beaton.
But such restraint is given no chance in modern cinema. The expletive isn’t the punch-line anymore, it’s the entire script. And whether we want to make the mental leap forward or not, this is the world our babies are waddling towards. A world where foul language and even fouler verbal imagery ooze from car stereos on street corners on a summer’s day. A world where verbal aggression, in light comedy or hip hop and heavy metal lyrics, are a given. Why do we expect children to remain immune to the world adults consent to, and for how long?
My son’s nursery floats two floors above a busy street corner in Brooklyn. In about nine months he will grasp at the words floating above the booming bass line. He might ask me “Mama, what’s a Bitch?” In the meantime, I am making the sterling effort to articulate my emotions with words that do no harm. Or less harm. To get to this point I pretend I am the missing member of the English Royal Family or Austin Powers or both. “Blast it!” I cry like an 18th century Admiral. “Damn Nuisance!” I mumble like an ageing Oxford Don. “Flipping Hell,” or even “Blimey,” I yell, mimicking Michael Caine’s haute Cockney.
All these silly words have an exotic ring and a whimsy; they’re so much more textural than conventional words pertaining to excrement and sex. Sadly we can blame post-pagan Christian England for that. Try and find a nice word for sex in English that is not an embarrassed or faintly farmyard euphemism. Bonk. Root. Shag. Hopeless. The French don’t have a “bad” word for intercourse. In fact, they use the same word to describe a kiss…Baiser. You even have to open your mouth in a half smile to say it. But I can’t break into French spontaneously; like most mothers I’m stuck with the blunt instrument that is English, and when pressed…the inherited scum of Anglo Saxon morality. For what is swearing if not shaming. With swearing comes a subscription to the notion of sin. I don’t believe in sin or using ugly words to describe beautiful or, very basically, natural acts. My son loves his poo, he shamelessly wees a crystal arc over the diaper table and then seizes his penis in triumph, and I share his joy in making up songs about poo, pee-pee and the weeny in-betweeny.
Raw, passionate and innocent to any sort of body guilt, the baby sets the tone, so I make every effort to use words of a joyous tone or slightly lighter words for heavier concepts around him. Tomorrow morning at 7 a.m., when I stagger across a pile of board books and stub my toe, I’ll say “Oh bother,” or “Oh fudge!” and feel as fancy as the Queen of Denmark, and my son will laugh. Poo is fun. Poo is a doing word. The bullshit of life, quite inevitably, can come later.