That Damn Car

Adella and I are cuddle bugs. We are cuddling in the comforter on Uncle Daniel’s bed with a copy of Where’s Waldo? Adella keeps poking me because I keep nodding off. She wants my help. Even after thirty years of practice, I still need a few minutes to find Waldo on any given page.

Adella keeps chattering away about her upcoming Christmas visit to Grandma Kemp as we search. Her chatter is soporific--I am battling to keep my eyes open. I am not winning.

Then Adella says it.

“I wish I didn’t have to go in that damn car,” Adella says.

I sit up in bed. I am now wide awake.

“Which car?” I say calmly. I darn well know which car. But I want to give her a chance to correct herself.

“That damn car,” she says.

No doubt about it. She has most definitely said damn. Damn effectively expresses how she feels about the interminably long six-hour ride from New Jersey to Ohio. (Sometimes eight hours, when you add in all those potty breaks.) Adella, however, does not sense the weight this word carries.

I do not want to draw attention to the word, making it all the more tantalizing. So I employ that time-honored parental technique--I choose to ignore her colorful language.

“It is a long time to ride in the car,” I say. “But isn’t it fun when you get there?”

And as she chatters about her Christmas plans in Ohio, I wonder just where she has learned this word. Adella is only five. Except for preschool and church, she spends nearly every waking moment with either her parents or me.

Adella’s foray into expressive language reminds me of a car ride twenty years ago, a routine jaunt to the preschool to drop off my three-year-old son Daniel. Startled when the car in front of me suddenly stopped short, I slammed on my brakes and sucked in an enormous breath of air. And then, without skipping a beat, Daniel shouted out from the backseat, “Damn it!” 

That day Daniel reformed me of peppering my language with an occasional salty word like hell or damn.

Where did Adella pick up her first four-letter word? Was it at preschool? Probably not from the nuns or her teachers. Another child on the playground? Perhaps. But I sure as heck know, it wasn’t from me.