C U Next Tuesday!

As you can tell from previous blogs, my family has quite the potty mouth.  We mostly attribute this bad habit to my father who never bothered to censor himself when we were growing up.  As young children, we heard (and used) language that would shock most truck drivers and in fact, we’ve been accused of having mouths like a trucker.  My older brother, who we like to call Bear, was the worst of all of us as children.  In fact, his very first word was “shut up”, which he learned from watching my father scream “shut up” out the back sliding door at the many dogs we used to have, which tended to get riled up and bark a lot.  Shut up may not sound like such a bad word, but please remember, this was Bear’s first word he ever said.  I like to think this was just an omen of what was to come.  We’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to Bear and the first memory we have of him using that filthy mouth as a child.

When I was about 4 and Panda was about 3, my parents took in two of our Cousins to live with us.  The younger cousin was the same age as me and we got on pretty well.  The older cousin was a girl of about 13 named Lisa; she was quite an angry teenager and sometimes difficult to deal with.  Panda and I didn’t interact with her much as she was quite a deal older than us, but Bear had the pleasure of dealing with her craziness quite often.  Needless to say, the two never got along. 

One morning, my dad was taking the 6 of us out somewhere, so we all got dressed and headed out to pile into my dad’s old truck (also known as the Piss-Mobile, which is a story for another blog).  As we were piling in, my cousin managed to piss Bear off, which was pretty typical.  Bear, sick and tired of her BS, acted out in his usual way and started an argument with her.  The argument came to a head when Bear yelled out to her and said “Stop being such a CUNT Lisa”. 

We are positive Bear heard the word from my dad, but my dad turned to Bear with an expression of utter shock on his face, as if he couldn’t understand where or how Bear could have learned that word.  Our dad grabbed Bear by the scruff of his neck, like a baby kitten, and dragged him into the house. 

 The rest of us, not really sure what was going to happen to Bear, ran after them.  As we ran into the house, we looked down the hallway and saw Bear sitting on the toilet in the front bathroom as my dad grabbed the bar of Zest soap from the sink.  We looked on in stunned horror as my dad shoved that bar of Zest soap into Bear’s mouth and made him sit there like that for five minutes.  All those years for my parents threatening to wash his mouth out with soap became a reality for Bear that day. 

After the washing of the mouth out with soap drama, my dad herded us all back into the Piss-Mobile and we headed out to accomplish our day’s activities.  As you can tell, Bear's punishment that day did not have the desired affect my dad had hoped for, as we can say for certain that word is used often in our household for a variety of different reasons.  In fact, I think the word has a special sentimental value to our family, as we all look back on that day with fondness, watching my dad shove that bar of Zest soap into Bear’s mouth remains one of our treasured memories of my dad’s unique parenting techniques.