Swear Like a Lady
This is the story of how I learned to swear like a fucking lady. It begins when I found myself shrieking at a group of 14-year-old children to:
“Shut. THE FUCK. Up!”
It may still be difficult to understand the surprise of this without understanding that as a child, I had once been homeschooled. I learned kickass sentence diagramming skills and how to take outlined sermon notes from textbooks written by Mennonites who slipped in subliminal messaging about gender roles on the sly.
My family didn’t wear head coverings or ban women from wearing pants, but once, my siblings and I saw my parents have a glass of wine at a Thanksgiving dinner with extended family. Dubious and alarmed, we ganged up on those two debauchers, arms crossed, and prepared for a full AA crisis intervention. My parents, that wretched pair, saw the jig was up and threw themselves at our feet, cloaked in guilt, and promised never to do it again. They tried throwing up flimsy excuses, palms upturned, floundering through an explanation that sometimes, the polite thing to do as adults is to accept a drink, even though it’s also the wrong thing. Very wrong. It would never happen again.
My father did indulge in the occasional explosive, doggonit! that in every other way felt like a million gaddammits! packed into one the way I imagine his father, a burly man of the greatest generation, must have loosed them after a long workday. Otherwise, I have never heard my parents say more than a darn, drat, or dagnabit.
And without understanding that I was once homeschooled, it would be hard to appreciate how the book Beautiful Girlhood, a sort of etiquette guide for to blossoming into an admirable Christian woman, worked its way into my development. This book, originally published in 1922, admonishes girls, when going out, not to, “laugh nor talk too loudly. To do so will only call upon her undesirable attention and criticism, and it is a sign of vulgarity. A real lady will not do so.”[1]
“Act like a lady,” my mother still chides us when either my sister or I loose a deep
or even simpering belch. My mother values a nice eyelet fabric, buffed neat toenails, and keeping elbows off the table when eating. So it is partially to my mother that I now owe the value of swearing like a lady and cursing with grace.
In Beautiful Girlhood, the author warns that every girl should, “Learn some useful way of wage-earning” for, “many are the women who face the world in terror that they must do business and have no idea of how it is done.” [2]
Beautiful Girlhood, then, also shoulders some responsibility for the manner in which I came to face the world of wage-earning as I did and ultimately, to my great surprise, came to blows with that group of 14-year-old children in shrieking:
“Shut. THE FUCK. Up!”
I had never heard my voice hit that particular tenor before and it would be awhile before I heard it again. And for three seconds, twenty-seven pairs of eyes were on me.
I was 23, and this was my first job. The week before students arrived, I had hauled in floor lamps and plugged them into three corners of the room. I had cut out inspirational quotes about reading from earth-toned cardstock saved from my scrapbooking days. I had smoothed a chalkboard decal onto the wall beside the door with a silly zebra beside it saying, “Welcome Freshman!” I had rolled a purple area rug out under my desk and stacked plastic trays atop one another ready to receive homework assignments. I had posted curriculum maps across the bulletin boards behind the desk. I had scrolled through the faces of my 117 students across my six preps and practiced matching their names.
I was now two months into teaching. Minutes prior to shrieking at the children, I stood at the front of my classroom, a PowerPoint frozen on the screen behind me. Having spent hours on the presentation reading ahead in the book the night before crafting text-based questions, my exhaustion and inexperience steamed from every pore. Students sprawled across and slumped behind and scampered around their desks. Paper airplanes lolled through the air, low on gas, carried along by chatter and laughter.
In trainings, teachers are taught to frame directions with clear action statements that reflect the norms and expectations of the classroom.
When a student talks out of turn: “We raise our hands in this classroom. Please raise your hand if you have a comment.”
When a student walks in late: “We use passes in this classroom. Please show me your hall pass and quietly take your seat.”
When students must return their attention to direct instruction: “We are all going to turn our voices off and face the front in the next five seconds. Five, we’re finishing our conversations, four, we’re facing forward, three we’re turning our voices off, two, we’re ready for our next direction, and one, thank you for your attention.”
A paper airplane landed at my feet. Manny, a small energetic boy terrified of nothing but his own father, waggled his palm in front of his face, rapping in rhythm of his own design, “Mutha-fucka, mutha-fucka, mutha-fuck-AH!”
Shawna, bedecked in eyeliner and blond extensions, strutted from her desk, flung the door open, turned, popped her hip, and announced, “If she don’t even start the class, I’m gonna go pee!”
Theresa, Joanna, and Perla clustered in the back row passing around miniature mirrors and tubes of lip gloss. Perla poked at her crown, swiveling her head this angle and that, making lips in the mirror. A curling iron sizzled in its outlet in on the floor.
“I need everybody’s eyes up here.” Nothing. Again, feet shoulder-width apart, hand on hip, other hand in the air, “If I do not have everyone’s voices off and eyes on me in the next five seconds, I will start the timer and we just sit here after the bell instead of heading to lunch for as long as it takes us to quiet down.”
“Mutha-fuck-AH!”
“I am starting the timer,” and I loaded changed screens to an online stopwatch in lieu of the PowerPoint.
I folded my arms and looked out. Two paper airplanes played chicken from opposite sides of the room.
The seconds accumulated on the screen. The lip-gloss girls erupted in giggles, Manny and Joe began a call and response pounding their desks in a drum line-esque cadence.
With every second tick, a bright red gurgling climbed in my gut. It was this moment that I shrieked:
“Shut. THE FUCK. Up!” then added, “And if I see one more paper airplane in this room, you will be sent to the office immediately.”
You know when you see a flock of geese migrating as a pack? Spaced in symmetrical rows yet acting as one elegant bird that twists and spirals about the sky as if the singular souls of each are linked together in one urgent primal need?
In that moment, no fewer than sixteen paper airplanes arched up in their irregular dopey flights above our
heads and crashed gracefully into walls and glided across the linoleum floor.
Laughter pealed.
I made it across the hall to the teachers’ lounge before collapsing into a rolling chair and sobbing like the little girl I was.
“They can be fucking shitheads sometimes,” my coworker said, patting my back awkwardly.
“I told them to shut the fuck up,” I muttered into my arms and looked up at him. He was arm deep into a bag of chips. “Am I going to get fired?”
He laughed the laugh of a much older teacher. “Not unless you don’t show up tomorrow. They’re in high school. They’ve heard it before. Just try not to say that every day.”
Research says swearing can give us a sense of power and control in a bad situation. It allows us to endure pain for a longer period of time. It can promote social bonding. And Beautiful Girlhood says, “It is better to be true in heart than to have merely the appearance of truth on the outside.”[3] Swearing, for me, forces some truth, some pain, some need for connection to the outside.
I savor the well-timed empathic fuuccckk! the same way I savor that second glass of wine or flouncing around in dresses with tiny spaghetti straps or smoking cigars outside with the men to avoid debates going on among the mommas about the pros and cons of sleep training your kids.
“You know, you’re gonna have to watch your language,” my friend Sharon sings in her pitchy I-don’t-know-how-else-to-tell-you-I’m-right-voice, “when the babies get a little older.”
Inevitably, the toddlers have started repeating every inane, poetic, or robotic phrase adults utter.
Thank you, Jesus, for this food.
Donald Trump! Donald Trump!
I do not want a consequence.
So it’s an especially powerful thing when mothers swear. Imagine my friend and homemaker, Lauren, with a shiny ponytail and the svelte form of a salsa-dancer. There she is: my best friend, mother of two, gouging away with a chef’s knife at an acorn squash, rinds and seeds flying. She has just spent two hours of her day grocery shopping from a list she drafted and then revised based on the layout of the store aisles. She has just schlepped, stuffed, strapped, packed, and unpacked a two year old and a baby into her Kia and driven down and back a series of crammed double-laned roads. She has saved, filed, and studied a Paleo diet casserole recipe while unloading and loading a dishwasher. She has just put the littlest down in her bedroom for a nap whilst the toddler yanks every pillow, cushion, and blanket onto the floor of the living room. Here she is. Blasting away at the squash
“Shit! fuck! fuck! fuck this fucking shit!”
Across the kitchen, she is cursing the unwieldy knife and the unfeeling vegetable as her son bursts into tears from the adjacent room.
I like to think about this. Lauren’s home is filled with handmade door wreaths and wall calendars and crock-pots and labeled baskets and soft music and candles. Most days, she greets her husband with a simmering dinner and gurgling stimulated children. Yet, on this day, she hands her husband the screaming toddler in need of a diaper change and heads out for a manicure. “Truth beautifies the wearer … A lie is cowardly.”[4]
Yes, swearing itself does not make a person trustworthy. But never ripping loose fuckity fuck fuck? Never pealing off a good damn it all to the blazing fires of hell? This seems to be a rejection of some kind of innate human element we, all of us, share. The denial of the obvious fact that our worlds are swirling in shitsandwiches, shitstorms, and shitheads beyond our control.
Jay was fourteen when I was his teacher, and even then, he was one smooth operator and wholly uninterested in 9th grade English and Literacy courses. He was not entirely to blame for this, for he had suffered the setback of landing in the (what I mentally labeled) Apathy Class. Apathy Class presents one of the most difficult dynamics I faced as a teacher, and I had one every term of every year of every grade I ever taught.
As an educator, I found few antidotes to combat group apathy. For in the Apathy Class, there is no frontrunner to isolate, no trending interest to capitalize upon, nothing held dear enough to withhold. Apathy Class by far poses the most unified of fronts wherein each individual sacrifices his or her own interests for the interest of the group. I have seen all A students relinquish control of 4.0 grade point averages after transferring into Apathy Classes. The groupthink is that strong. No hands in the air. No materials on desks. No response to candy or points or phone calls home. Just lots of naps, ballpoint pen hand tattoos, and games of lazy desk basketball with crumpled pages of notebook paper.
My latest intervention for Jay’s class was to introduce group work. Students dragged their desks together in clumps of three to “discuss” the previous chapter and fill in a packet. Jay had been assigned the role of “vocabulary master” that week and was to look up three unfamiliar words and define them for the group. This new strategy allowed me opportunity to break into their groupthink with one-on-one conversations.
I sat backwards on a chair in front of Jay.
“Jay.”
He smacked his forehead down on the desk.
“J’wan, can you talk to me for a second?”
He froze. I studied the Aztec looking symbols carved delicately in his hairline along the side of his head looping around his ear. I wondered how often he had them retouched. Both edges on the sides of his neck were always sharp, as if he buzzed it every morning. A dainty metal bar pierced his eyebrow like a toy arrow.
“You haven’t turned anything in for over a month. Hey. Look at me a minute.”
He slid his chin up on his arm and avoided my eyes.
“If you keep this up, you’re just going to have to take this class again next year.”
Nothing.
I searched in my teacher tool bag of anything else to say to him. Before thinking about it, I heard myself, “Jay, you know this is total bullshit.”
His mouth twitched, surprised, trying to beat back a grin. The sheer dorkiness of hearing your teacher say bullshit.
“You’re way too smart to take this class again.” I smiled, he glanced up at me with more engagement and shimmer than he had all term, and I walked away.
That day, Jay got out a pencil, opened his book, and doodled dead bunnies on his packet for the rest of the period.
“There is no nobler profession for any girl to choose than that of a teacher. Her years of preparation will be filled with hard work and persistent efforts, and the performing of that work is both wearing and vexing; but the results can be great.”[5]
And Jay did take that class again as a sophomore. But he at least always stopped in and waved to me in the freshman teachers’ lounge.
The tradition I come from speaks a lot about the idea of living above reproach. For at any given time, the world may peek through the gingham curtain into our lemon-scrubbed pot-roasty kitchens, and when they do, they should smell there a pure aroma, free from lewdness and drunkenness and vulgarity of speech.
So it is in this spirit of honesty and uprightness of heart, that I admonish the young lady to swear. But when you swear, do so free from the irony of a double life and without hatred toward your fellow man, but in great joy and fellowship with the human race for the small locus of control we hold over the shitstorms of our lives. Do so with gladness and sincerity of spirit. So that when you do swear, you swear like a fucking lady.
[1] Hale, Mabel. “A Conversation on Dress,” in Beautiful Girlhood. Indiana: Gospel Trumpet Company, 1922. play.google. Web. 14 January 2017. 129.
[2] Hale, Mabel. “An Accomplished Girl,” in Beautiful Girlhood. Indiana: Gospel Trumpet Company, 1922. play.google. Web. 14 January 2017. 103.
[3] Hale, Mabel. “Beauty of Truthfulness,” in Beautiful Girlhood. Indiana: Gospel Trumpet Company, 1922. play.google. Web. 14 January 2017. 63.
[4] Hale, Mabel. “Beauty of Truthfulness,” in Beautiful Girlhood. Indiana: Gospel Trumpet Company, 1922. play.google. Web. 14 January 2017. 129.
[5] Hale, Mabel. “Choosing a Lifework,” in Beautiful Girlhood. Indiana: Gospel Trumpet Company, 1922. play.google. Web. 14 January 2017. 199.
A.J. PAXTON is a bookstore manager at BookBar in Denver. She is earning her MA in creative writing from Regis University, was a finalist in the 2016 ACC Writers Studio Contest, and has been published in Inner Weather Magazine.