Cuss Can
by Jane Hammons

When I was a teenager in the ‘70s and proclaimed myself a feminist, I made the mistake of equating the power of liberation with that of being offensive. To my extreme gratification, people in Roswell, New Mexico, where I grew up, were shocked to hear a freckle-faced farm-girl utter fuck or shit or fuckingshit with every other breath.
 
When you become a parent, there are all kinds of habits you have to break.

Screaming fuckingshitheadbitchbastard when you spill the milk is one of them. I try not to swear in front of my children, not only because I don’t want them to be foul-mouthed, but more importantly because foul language, especially when hurled in anger, can be frightening to children. It is a signal that the adult is out of control. Out-of-control adults are scary things.

In our house bad words will cost you: Dick and Prick a dime; a quarter for Damn and Hell; add another quarter for God in front of Damn; Bitch and Bastard fifty cents; Fuck and Shit a dollar. The money goes into the cuss can (an ugly vase prominent on the mantle) and is used for bowling, renting movies or buying books.

To avoid these costly penalties, my children and I often swear with words we find odd or amusing. Codpiece is one of our favorites. My older son sometimes adds friggin’ (a word with no penalty) to codpiece, when, for example, the driver of the minivan stops in the middle of the street to unload what seems like 40 children in front of the preschool between our house and his school. None of these 40 children can make it out of the car without forgetting a jacket, dropping a lunchbox, returning for one last hug, so we sit in kid traffic, which makes him late for school and me late for work.

Despite the fact that they’ve heard me swear more often than they should, and despite the widespread use of vulgar language in popular culture and public discourse, my children seldom use foul language. They understand its power, and they hold it in reserve.

While driving back from my parents’ house near Santa Cruz, my youngest son reports that he has a stomach ache just as we leave behind the winding highway that cuts through the Santa Cruz Mountains. We are about 20 minutes from Santa Cruz and about an hour from home. But returning through beach traffic along the narrow, two-lane highway will take far longer than an hour.

So we head for home. After about 20 minutes, my son reports that he is going to have diarrhea. This report has been preceded by some pretty bad gas, so I’m not surprised. I pull off the freeway and look for a service station. We don’t make it in time. When we finally find a station with an unlocked bathroom, I take clean clothes from the suitcase in the back of the car and help him change, throwing his soiled underwear into a nearby dumpster. This takes about 15 minutes. He needs to stop again in less than a half hour.

The third time, we are only 20 minutes from home. I tell him that he'll just have to sit in it for a while, reminding him that when he was a baby, he wore dirty diapers and didn’t even seem to mind. He agrees, but on one condition.

"Can I say the S-word? For free?”

"Yes,” I laugh, understanding that it is the appropriate one.
 
"Shit," he smiles weakly through the tears that are trickling down his face. "Can I say it again?"

"Okay.”

"Shit," he says a bit louder. "One more time?"

"One more. After that, you’ll have to put a dollar in the cuss can."

He covers his ears and yells “Shit!” at the top of his lungs and then becomes quiet, squirming in discomfort as I navigate weekend traffic, swearing silently at pockets of slow-moving cars.
 
As we pull into the driveway, my son asks sheepishly, "Mom, do you have to pay for bad words you say inside your head?"

“What goes on inside your head is between you and God,” I say.

“God?” He looks at me in surprise. My children’s religious education is in the hands of their father, a practicing Catholic.  I respect their beliefs, but I don’t pretend to share them.

“Okay,” I adjust my response. “It’s between you and Sally,” I say, referring to the therapist he’s been seeing since I filed for divorce from his father.

“So it’s not friggin’ free,” my older son chimes in from the back seat where he has been sitting silently with his head buried in beach towels trying to stifle the stench of his brother’s gas by breathing in the scent of cocoa butter and sun screen. “You have to pay Sally, right?”

“You’re right,” I agree.

“Is anything free?” my younger son asks, brow furrowed.

 “Air,” I say, opening the car door. My sons jump out of the car; the older one heads for the backyard, the younger for the bathroom. I breathe deeply and begin unloading the car, hoping there is enough money in the cuss can for pizza and a movie tonight. If there isn’t, I can sure as shit cover the pizza by paying for what’s been inside my head for the last hour.

Jane Hammons teaches writing at UC Berkeley and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her two sons. She has fiction forthcoming in Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers. Her most recent writing appears online in River Walk Journal and Slow Trains Literary Journal.

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