I admit it; I am a curser. I have been since I was about 16 years old, when my brother, Bobby, ticked me off one day and I chased him all over our front yard calling him all kinds of names and screaming "I'll kill you, dammit!"
I am not proud of this fact.
My worse cursing moments occur during fits of road or drive-thru rage. Ask my daughters. They were traumatized as children when someone cut me off or couldn't speak English at the drive-thru speaker. (I can still hear Jess' little toddler voice saying "uh-oh" when the drive-thru operator repeated back my order wrong.)
It hasn't helped matters that I married a man who may be a direct descendant of a Yankee Catholic sailor. When we met, my curse word vocabulary increased.
My oldest daughter, Amber, may have inherited the forked tongue, as I have heard her let out a string of epitaphs during a fit of rage (sometimes directed at me, sometimes a bad driver or bad boyfriend) that would shame some men. Some say I should be proud she took 'something' after me.
Now my youngest daughter, Jess, is quite the opposite. Her mouth does not utter such indiscretions. At least not in my presence. I am not saying she is an angel by any stretch of the imagination...but she has control of her emotions, and therefore her tongue, I suppose.
Except for one time:
We had traveled two and half , maybe three hours, from Georgia to Chattanooga, Tennessee, for a nice little family vacation. We were booked in a hotel near the aquarium and also planned to see Lookout Mountain, Rock City and Ruby Falls. After the drive, we were pulling into the parking deck at the hotel, and Jessica , age three at the time, decided she was ready to come out of the booster seat that had held her hostage for hours. She unbuckled her seat belt and slid out of the booster seat while our car was still moving. I turned to her, finger pointing and wagging, and eyebrows knitted, and said 'Jessica Chapple, you get back in that car seat and don't you come out until this car is parked and not moving.' She hopped her chubby little self back in the car seat and started buckling herself back in, then yelled 'You damn Mama!' in the sternest voice her little self could muster.
I was so shocked to hear these words come out of her mouth, I was speechless! But only momentarily. I looked at Chuck and saw the shocked look on his face, then one of us giggled. Then I could Amber in the back seat giggling. We tried real hard not to laugh (as not to encourage this behavior), but it was so difficult!
I haven't heard Jess truly 'curse' since that day. Oh, she uses 'substitute' words like freaking, but not the hardcore stuff. If she did, I would be just as shocked today as I was the day she was three years old!
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| Me, Chuck, Amber and Jess while vacationing in Chattanooga, TN. We took the riverboat ride up the river and back. Great fun! Can you imagine bad words coming out of either of these sweet girls' mouths??? |
