A profanity

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

~ Mark Twain

I have a potty mouth. It’s not a secret and it has caused more problems for me that I care to count. My husband rarely swears, and if he does it’s usually when we are alone and he’s venting about work.

My profanity filter has begun to fail on me. I can be decorous around my proper-lady mother. I don’t’ try to out swear my ex-sailor father, but will drop a ‘fuck’ here and a ‘Gawddamit’ there without pause where once I had to be exceptional angry to bring out the big guns.

Life got out of control and so did my frustration. I clearly remember telling my young children that they were too smart of use gutter language, that they had a vocabulary impressive enough to say what they needed without resorting to swearing.

I stand corrected.

There are times when a well-spoken profanity is all that is needed to release all that pent up aggravation. Even those innocuous moments when you’re alone and a simple ‘dangit’ would suffice, a full-voiced ‘shit’ is amazingly cathartic…

• when you somehow manage to break an acrylic nail and it hurts like a mofo
• you’re running errands and one of your car’s dashboard idiot lights comes on and you have no idea what it means, and it triggers a panic attack
• you spend an hour fixing a meal, only to drop it on the floor as you take it out of the oven and there is nothing else in the frig you can make for dinner
• you discover you’ve been wearing your shirt inside-out all day, or had on two different color shoes
• after washing a load of clothes, you open the dryer to discover a wet, soured load forgotten inside
• while parking you either scrape your front bumper across the top of the concrete barriers between spaces or grind your wheels along the curb
• you go to pick up a prescription only to find out that the pre-authorization hasn’t gone through and instead of your standard $25 co-pay, the cost is $255
• the power goes out while you’re in the middle of paying bills online and you have to reboot your computer and start from scratch
• while taking a hot, steamy, relaxing shower and someone starts the dishwasher/clothes washer/flushes a toilet sucking all the cold water out of the line, resulting in first degree burns and a possible sprained ankle from attempts to avoid the scalding stream
• you drop a plate/cup and in an effort to keep it from shattering you reflexively stick out your foot, saving the tableware but breaking a toe
• you remember at noon that you had a doctor’s appointment at 11a.m.
• putting on makeup one morning you discover a grey hair in your eyebrow or lashes
• you make plans to spend a day all to yourself, say… taking photos, drive an hour away from home only to discover you have 20% battery power in your camera and your backup pack is dead
• whenever you exit your car, the second you touch the door to shut it, the built-up static electricity shocks the shit out of you

…not that any of these things have ever caused me to utter scatological verbiage.