Do You Kiss Your Momma With That Mouth??

"Yakety yak!
(Don't talk back!)" - The Coasters

"Good authors, too, who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes." - Cole Porter



For all of you mothers who feel like you have too many kids, there will come a time when it is rare that they are all together in one spot. And when they do converge for a moment, it is like a little gift.

Last night my kitchen was the scene of a noisy collection of teenagers smacking away at their cheesesteaks with reckless abandon and discussing movies. The picture is fresh in my mind. Unfortunately, so is the soundtrack. . .

"Have y'all seen 'Transformers' yet, its awesome??!!" My nineteen year old asked.

"Ooooh, I wanna see that!" The five year old answered. Smack smack.

"I'm going to see the new movie with Robin Williams tonight. It's supposed to be awesome!" he continued.

"Ooooh, I wanna see that!" Smack smack.

My fifteen year old daughter spoke up mid-fry, "I HAVE to see Harry Potter!"

"Ooooh, I wanna see that!" Five year olds appear so easy to please on the surface.

"Yeah," The nineteen year old went on, chomping, "that's gonna be awesome."

"You say you have a hairy what??" The thirteen year old has no idea who W.C. Fields is, but he can sure do his voice.

"What a dumb-A!"

"You're such a BE-otch!" And thus the conversation deteriorated, with them skirting dirty words via vowel replacement. . .

"HEY! GUYS! Watch your language!"

"Aw, c'mon mom! We didn't say the actual words. Besides, you know she's got the worst mouth of all of us!" The younger boy nodded at the baby.

Well, she is surrounded by a bunch of potty-mouthed teenagers. I have friends who don't allow their children to use "stupid" or "dummy" and I wonder what they think of my little angel screeching after her brother, "Ya friggin IDIOT!"

It's awful! I've tried "we don't use those words" and "that's not nice" and even "vulgarity is the parish of the abysmally ignorant" (she's a smart girl!)

My husband insists that the answer lies in a bar of Lava soap. Do they still MAKE Lava soap??

Maybe I should get right to the source and start scrubbing the smut out of my teenagers' vocabularies? The nineteen year old is frequently called on his lack of mouth control, ("Sorry, Mom, I am used to being with the guys.") Perhaps "the guys" could benefit from hiccupping some bubbles as well.

The other day, they made a big hoo-ha over "Burying the 'n-word.'" But even when you swap around vowels or come up with clever ways of saying it without saying it, the words are still there. There are a lot of great words out there that we could use without having to go with "cuss-mutants" and "insert letter here-words."

So, how do we keep our kids from just saying anything in a world where it seems that anything goes?

I'll be $#&%(@! if I know. . . .