By: Anjum Khan

“…ssssshit”‘.

I stopped dead in my tracks. Did I hear that right?

“Aria, what did you say?”

I look over at my 15-month-old who had just dropped my set of keys and there it was again, “ssshit, shit, SHIT!”

She enunciated with more and more emphasis each time she said it.

My first reaction? What I can best describe as a giggle-snort A.K.A. a pathetic attempt to disguise my laughter – for those few seconds it took for my sleep-deprived, coffee-dependent brain to process what had just happened, there was nothing more hilarious.

My next reaction? “Oh.My.God, what have I done?”

Being the first ones with a baby in our group of friends meant many a conversation that went something like this:  ‘Oh man, one day we’re going to have to start watching what we say around her aren’t we? Yeah that’s gonna suck; f*ck it, we’ve got time.”

Womp womp womp.

So there we were, clearly the time was now and our efforts, or lack thereof, had been futile.

Look, I appreciate the importance of raising a polite kid who knows what’s wrong and right and doesn’t walk around dropping f-bombs in the middle of circle time but let’s be real for a minute.

Trust me – I’ve tried replacing those words with something more PG – Oh snap/drat/rats/geez/gosh/darn yada yada yada, but what about when your toddler invades the kitchen cabinets, throws your makeup in the toilet, rips their “suction” bowl (don’t even get me started on these) off the high chair, strewing enough peas across the floor that you are sure you’ll be finding them for weeks… all before 11am!

You have to be kidding me if you can tell me that an “oh geez” would cut it at that point.

Parenting a toddler is often likened to a dealing with drunk person with poor impulse control and no sense of shame.

So when your tiny drunk human decides to start talking and one of its first words is an expletive, don’t be too hard on yourself. Lucky for us, not unlike their drunk adult counterparts, they have the attention span of goldfish.

After I got over the hilarity (and got video evidence of course), I managed to contain my laughter and ignored it the next couple of times and voila, it vanished from her vocabulary just as fast as it had appeared.

So my fellow sweary mamas, when you’re having one of those days, don’t fight it; ball up those fists, raise your shoulders, throw your head back, take deep breath and let it out (insert expletive of choice).

Then you have a glass of wine. You deserve it.