Wait, Swearing Means I’m An Honest Mom? Well, No Sh*t!

Finally, a team of international researchers from business and social and psychological sciences has discovered what frazzled mothers all across America already know: Swearing may be a sign of integrity!

Well Hole. E. Shit! Can I get an A-fucking-men?!

The two-part study concluded that people who regularly use profanity in their vocabulary are doing so to better express their feelings, and the more a person swears, the more honest they are likely to be. “The consistent findings across the studies suggest that the positive relation between profanity and honesty is robust,” the study says.

I’m one of those people who was told years ago, and very early on in my mothering, things like, “You always say what I am thinking!” and “I love your honesty!” Perhaps it was the fact that while I was preaching the uncomfortable and brutally honest truths of motherhood, I had unconsciously peppered in plenty of F-bombs. I’m just guessing all my “Nursing fucking sucks!” and “This shit hurts like a mother fucker!” along with “My toddler is a constant royal pain in my ass!“ and “Fuck no, I’m not gonna miss my kid when they go to kindergarten!” rants would explain their keen observations of me. Hey, I’ve got science on my side now, bitches. Oh, and you’re welcome for me making you feel fucking normal.

This is my 19th year of mothering, and I don’t know how I would have made it through some of those hard and incredibly mind-numbing and emotionally difficult days without being able to verbally vomit my feelings and frustrations out with plenty of blasphemous buzzwords. Because when you’re shuffling around your kid-filled house like a zombie, numb with the thought, “How did this happen to me?” doesn’t it just feel better and more honest to just say, “How the fuck did this happen to me?” It sure as hell does! So let it go ladies: Let your freak-fucking-flag fly! Honesty is the best policy, right?

It’s not lost on me that one of the consequences of freely expressing my honest truths about parenting at a rate of about 45 F-bombs per day has seeped into the vernacular of my four sons; hence I’ve got some seriously sailor-talking teenagers here. And brace yourself filthy language police, I’m totally okay with it.

In fact, I’m more than okay with it, because once again, science is on my side with this one. My foul-mouthed teenagers are some of the smartest and most vocabulary-rich people I know, and yet another study on the characteristics of people who can properly place F-bombs in their stream of speech agrees. The conclusion published in the journal Language Sciences hypothesized that people who are well-versed in curse words are more likely to have greater overall language fluency too.

I can personally attest to that shit, having a kid who never shied away from expressing his high school frustrations and teen angst with a plethora of obscenities that would make a truck driver wince. That same kid? He scored in the 99th percentile on the reading/language portion of his college entrance exams, and from the time he was 18 months old had a vocabulary richer than any of his peers. It just didn’t get “colorful” until the teen years.

Listen, of course I don’t just let my teens spew out a shitload of motherfuckers at inappropriate times, like in church, at their jobs, or in front of younger children. Thank goodness they’ve taken after me in the civil and polite use of taboo speech, and the fact they know when it’s okay to say “Fuck this shit” out loud and when to quietly nod and just say that shit to themselves, inside their mind really loud.

But I’m glad that at a time in life when most teenagers retreat to their rooms on a regular basis, share nothing with their parents, and hold their emotions and honest feelings to themselves, I’ve somehow managed to create an environment where they never felt like they needed to hold back on expressing what they’re really thinking. If the only way for them to open up and tell me that some crazy shit went down in school today is to literally say, “Mom, some fucked-up shit happened in school today, and I need to tell you about it,” then so be it. Bring on the sacrilegious speech, smarty pants, because I’m all ears and so ready to hear it. I’m honest like that.

Perhaps society wouldn’t have a problem with “alternative facts” if we let our own press drop an honest F-bomb or 10 when reporting today’s news.

Now that would be a news broadcast I would not fucking miss.