Saturday, May 14, 2011

Cursewords and Lullabies

There is a rumor going around that I have a touch of the Potty Mouth.


(Grandma, now is a good time for you to decide that this simply cannot be true and stop reading.)


Everybody else is sniggering and having flashbacks to some moment in our shared past when I uttered some flagrantly inapproprate (but funny!) curseword-peppered invective under my breath...or out loud.  Depending on whether or not we may have been partaking of adult beverages at the time.


I will confess that there are times when cursing is not only cathartic...but necessary.  But I swear (no pun intended) that I am working on it.


This week, I received no fewer than six different emails/Facebook messages/forwarded book recommendations for the following:





From Amazon.com: Go the Fuck to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don't always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach's verses perfectly capture the familiar--and unspoken--tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, they open up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations, and laugh at their absurdity.
With illustrations by Ricardo Cortes, Go the Fuck to Sleep is beautiful, subversive, and pants-wettingly funny--a book for parents new, old, and expectant. You probably should not read it to your children.


Okay.  I admit.  This is funny, funny stuff.  Completely inappropriate, but hilarious. 

Two of these forwards came from friends with tongue-in-cheek notes about how the combo of F-Bomb and Sleep Desperation was meant for me.  

I'm Horrified.

Okay, not really.  But I am a little bit embarrassed.  Because as much as The Husband jokes about Not Being Able to Take the Girl out of the Trailer...I actually like to think of myself as moderately cultivated.  Okay, maybe not.  But I'm not so bad that you couldn't introduce me to your grandmother (just don't serve me a Bloody Mary when we meet...unless she's tossing them back, too).

Backtrack about 6 years, I actually made a good friend because I was in an intensive French Study Course with her husband.  He went home and told her, "I met a woman in French Class today and you HAVE to become friends".  Her puzzled look and "Why??" was met with a frank declaration that I was the only person he'd ever met that swears as much as she does.  Who me?  The most horrifying part of that whole exhange was that I was obviously swearing up a red streak...and it was FRENCH class.  I was supposed to be speaking nothing but French.  Somehow I had tossed in a few choice cursewords.  Turns out she was a great friend.  And, in fact, she swore more than I did.  But only by a tiny bit.  And it turns out that her husband taught me some choice cursewords in French. C'est vrai.


Anyway...the point of that little digression was that I used to swear a lot (not really, Grandma.  I'm just kidding).  But I've really censored myself.  I now say things like "Jackhammer" and "Cheese & Rice", and "Dadgammit", and "Frick".  People who knew the old me would raise an eyebrow at my cleaned up self and wonder.  But truly, I'm better!


I'm putting this out there because I don't want there to be a general idea floating around my circle of frends that I might actually sing my kids dirty limmericks at night or read them stories like the one above.  Despite the well-known fact that I am desperate for some good sleep, I've even stopped short of drugging my kids to get them to sleep.  While that might sound insane to many of you...I promise you that my ex-pat circle of friends will either cop to having done it (to counter JetLag...or to survive 36-hour travel debacles) or know somebody that has.  I'm not judging....the truth is that we tried Benadryl once with Drama (not to get her to sleep, but because of an allergy) and she was up all night jumping up and down in her crib, and I have no desire to reduce the number of hours of sleep that I get.


And I'm also kind of pissed off.  Because I totally should have written that book.

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