So I took all your thoughts yesterday and sat on them at night like a mother bird warming her eggs.  Little thought eggs.  Why am I so squeamish about curse words in front of the kids?  I’m not squeamish when they come to me with a curse word, asking what it means, but I am squeamish about the idea of presenting them with words: saying them myself or providing them in art.

But still, I don’t want to make those words taboo, so I decided to broach the topic with the twins before bed.  After a long discussion of why there are things that are appropriate in art that aren’t appropriate in the face-to-face world (person stripping in front of you = inappropriate; nudes at the Tate = art) and how people use cursing in songs, I asked them how they would feel if we stopped muting out the curse words and just played the songs as is.

The ChickieNob (of course) raised two interesting questions, neither of which I could answer well in the moment.

1. I am telling them not to use curse words they hear in the songs in school, but the ChickieNob wants to know how she will know what is a curse word and what is simply an unfamiliar word.  She was very concerned about this; that she would inadvertently use a curse word, even in an innocent manner such as asking someone what the word means.  The example she gave was “Gangnam Style.”  She said that kids were reprimanded at school for using the term “sexy.”  It’s a word in the song so they all know it, but the ChickieNob wasn’t aware until kids got in trouble that it would be an inappropriate word to use.  It didn’t occur to her that she shouldn’t use it; she simply hasn’t used it yet because she didn’t know what the word meant or how to place it in a sentence.

2. What about words I find repugnant — would I still mute those or would I allow them to play?  There are two occurrence of this that I can think of in Green Day songs in particular.  The first is “retarded” used in a derogatory manner.  I’ve always muted that because I don’t want it said around me.  Certainly not a curse word, but a word used in a repugnant manner.  The other is “fag.”  It’s used self-descriptively: the singer is using it to highlight what he has been called in the past (vs. using the term towards another person in a derogatory manner) but it’s a word that I don’t want around me.  That I think of as a hateful term even when it’s used tongue-in-cheek.  Interestingly, the ChickieNob asked if I would still mute those since she knows that there are times that I’m muting not because it’s a curse word but because it’s a hate word.  So do I continue to mute those?  Or do I allow everything to be heard?

See, good questions.

Counting down the days to Christmas with a daily morning post containing a photograph of the White House Christmas decorations.  Have no clue why someone Jewish is doing this or how I got all these pictures — read the first post.

This is my favourite room in the White House: the library.  I also love the back story to the space — in addition to holding books and being a meeting room, the First Ladies used this room to do laundry before they had washing machines.

You’ll notice on the table that there is a snow globe.  That is one of the White House Christmas craft projects, and you can get the instructions on how to make one yourself on their site.

Back when I was growing up, there were two kinds of kids: the ones whose parents would allow them to listen to George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” (unedited version) and the ones whose parents wouldn’t allow them to listen to it.  Radio stations had a highly edited version which removed any reference to sex, therefore rendering the song meaningless.  What did George Michael want?  The kids who could only listen to the radio version didn’t know.  Okay, so there were actually three kinds of kids: those who could listen to the unedited version, those who could listen to the edited version, and those who were not allowed to listen to the song in any form as well as the entire Wham! songbook because now “Careless Whisper” was tainted by George Michael’s dirty video.

It’s sort of shocking that this song created such a controversy when it came out.  There are none of George Carlin’s 7 Words You Can’t Say on Television in the lyrics. In fact, George Michael is preaching extremely tame, vanilla-flavoured, monogamous sex between — at least assumed from the video — men and women.  I loved how he wrote on the woman: “explore monogamy” — as if monogamy was this unusual path that no adult took but perhaps might want to try for its titillation factor.

My parents not only allowed me to listen to the unedited version, but we also owned the video.  I had just turned 13 years old when the song came out, and I remember being on the bus for a school field trip that fall.  The kids were talking about the song, taking a poll as to whom was allowed to listen to which version.  A friend of mine informed the group that not only was I allowed to listen to it and sing the lyrics at home, but I was allowed to watch the video and didn’t even have to sneak it.  And even more shocking, any lyrics I didn’t understand, I had questioned and received definitive answers (“What does he mean by boys you can trust and girls that you don’t?”).  Oh we were so innocent back then.

But the point is that while I wasn’t allowed to watch violent films, I was allowed to listen to the Violent Femmes at home (my friend at Hebrew school gave me my first Femmes cassette when I was 10 or 11), Madonna, and George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex.”  As an adult, I appreciate that my parents didn’t make sexuality or words taboo.  It meant that I grew up with a comfortable space where I could ask frank questions and receive frank answers.  I never had to sneak around or be confused or make poor choices.

Fast forward to parenthood.

I’m totally comfortable answering any question the twins throw my way including discussion on how babies are made or come out, body parts, why the Victoria Secret models are wearing such little clothing and why some women want to own such fancy bras.  And yet, I am totally squeamish about playing curse words in front of the kids.  We have a mute button on the steering wheel.  I allow them to play any song they want, BUT I mute out the curse words.

Which is odd because as long as it is just the four of us, they are allowed to use any word they want to use as long as it is not used in anger at another person.  At this age, it isn’t really an issue; though I know that they know curse words because they’ve come to me before to ask what various curse words mean.  They hear them from older kids on the playground and people we’re walking past in the mall. (Yes, when you are saying “fuck that!” into your cell phone, everyone else around you can hear you too.)  I don’t like the concept of “bad words” and wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Carlin:

I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I think is important. They’re my work, they’re my play, they’re my passion. Words are all we have, really. We have thoughts but thoughts are fluid. Then we assign a word to a thought, and we’re stuck with that word for that thought, so be careful with words. I like to think that the same words that hurt can heal; it is a matter of how you pick them.

There are some people that are not into all the words. There are some that would have you not use certain words. There are 400,000 words in the English language and there are 7 of them you can’t say on television. What a ratio that is: 399,993 to 7. They must really be bad. They’d have to be outrageous to be separated from a group that large. “All of you over here.  You 7, Bad Words.”

That’s what they told us they were, remember? “That’s a bad word!” No bad words.  Bad thoughts, bad intentions, and words. You know the 7, don’t you, that you can’t say on television? Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, CockSucker, MotherFucker, and Tits. Those are the heavy seven.

As a writer, it’s a dangerous game when you start outlawing words.  Actions, yes.  I can comfortably ban actions from my house such as poking your sister over and over again even as she’s screaming at you to stop touching her.  But words, no.  There are certain times when you need certain words.  They’re not appropriate for all occasions or all company, but when they are needed, there is not another words that will do quite as well.

But as a mother, I feel as if it’s part of my job not to use those words in front of them casually; and that includes playing them in music.  Hence the mute button.  And I feel no qualms about that censorship, especially because I once read an interview with the lead singer of Green Day who admitted that he coughed loudly to cover the curse words in his own music for his kids when they were younger.  If he can censor his own music, I don’t feel badly when I censor it for the time being too.

So we arrive at the situation:

Green Day released three albums this year.  Yay!  We received the first one as a free download with our concert tickets.  The kids were eager to hear the new music.  I listened to it a few times, trying to memorize the location of all the curse words.  Then I played it for them in the car.  And I realized just how many curse words were in there as I hit the mute button over and over again.  And I missed a bunch.  Which made the kids laugh hysterically.  And then I just gave up and took the CD out of the player.

I haven’t purchased the other two albums because I didn’t know what to do.

You see, for the first time ever, Green Day released radio edit versions of all three albums.  No more muting.  So why don’t I purchase those versions, you ask?  Because they’re not done in the same vein as CeeLo Green’s “Forget You” vs. “Fuck You.”  In that case, the “Forget You” version is just as good as the original, and the kids don’t even realize that they’re missing anything.  The Green Day version simply is the same song and someone has garbled the curse words.  It sounds awful.  They are not versions I’d want to listen to on my own.

So muting really isn’t a viable option with these albums (too many curse words).  But the clean versions sound awful to my adult ears.  And I only want to purchase one copy — that’s the limitation we’re working with.  That’s where things stand.

So my options, as I see them (though if you can think of other ones, let me know):

1. Purchase the clean versions.  Play them in the car for the kids.  No muting necessary.  Grit my teeth and grow to hate the albums.
2. Purchase the real versions.  Don’t play them at all for the kids.  Own the good versions.  Want to listen to them in the car but be unable to do so.
3. Purchase the real versions.  Play them without muting for the kids.  Have them hear all these words which aren’t “bad” (as George Carlin points out) but which I feel squeamish playing.  Wonder if I’m noble or should just get over this.

Josh knows which one of those three options he wants to do.  I do not.

Within those three options, for children who are 8 years old and fairly mature (as in, they know better than to use these words at school), what would you do?  And why?

Counting down the days to Christmas with a daily morning post containing a photograph of the White House Christmas decorations.  Have no clue why someone Jewish is doing this or how I got all these pictures — read the first post.

Every room has unique Christmas decorations. This is the Vermeil Room and the decorations all focus on the theme of giving, as symbolized by the vermeil silver collection always in this room.

I finally put my finger on what bothered me so much with the coverage of that study (and assumptions within the study itself): that all infertile people are childless until proven parenting.

Some will be comfortable with that assertion — they are going through treatments or are in the process of adopting, but they have no children yet so they’re fine with being called childless.  But others will be put off by the reductive at best (and cruel at worst) nature of stating that all people without children are childless.

To begin, I feel — personally — as if I were in a different state once I began treatments vs. when we first started trying to conceive.  In the former state, I had made a decision without any hardship in sight.  In the latter, I now had to decide how badly I wanted to reach that goal.  Was it worth the physical pain of treatments?  The financial pain of treatments?  What was the worth of my emotional state?  I was a different sort of person once I had to think through those questions; a pre-parent that I (and look carefully, I’m discussing myself, not everyone) don’t believe I was at first.  I was making parenting decisions even though there were no children in sight.  Because all of those decisions you make when you are undergoing assisted conception or the adoption process are parenting decisions for a hypothetical-until-actual child.

Which is not to say that there weren’t parenting decisions even before we were diagnosed as infertile.  When I started taking folic acid and went off my cholesterol medication prior to conceiving, I was making a parenting decision, trying to create the best environment for my child.  But the decisions I made during treatments were a notch above what I made prior to infertility.  I went above-and-beyond what the average woman needs to consider pre-parenting.  And for that reason alone, my childless state prior to parenting was different pre-infertility and during infertility.  Therefore, it would make sense that childlessness after infertility is different from childlessness during infertility.

Because to think otherwise is to misunderstand that living child-free after infertility looks and feels the same as being in the throes of infertility (or, even worse, being in a limbo state within infertility) and that simply isn’t the case.  Perhaps that is why living child-free after infertility (LCFAI; apologies that I need to reduce this to an acronym, but it’s getting difficult to type it so many times) is so misunderstood.  LCFAI has more in common with parenting after infertility than it does to those going through treatments.  Both are on the same side of the resolution divide, if we can really call it a divide at all.

LCFAI is a mindful decision, not a default position.  And perhaps if people recognized it as such, they wouldn’t spend so much time trying to convince those living child-free to try one more thing or begin sentences with “have you considered…”  They would see it as a viable choice, one that takes into account a plethora of factors that makes it the best choice for some and anathema for others, in the same way that treatments, adoption, surrogacy, donor gametes, or trying unassisted is the best choice (or anathema) for others.

While I don’t have experience personally in living child-free after infertility (and hopefully people who do will chime in via the comment section), I cannot imagine that it feels the same as infertility based on the fact that life situations rarely feel the same pre-decision and post-decision even though the only thing that has changed in your life is the making of a decision.  Doesn’t engagement feel different from dating?  And I would assume that divorce feels different from the dissolution of the marriage.

The decision to live child-free is not passive; it’s an active solution, a way of resolving infertility.  And so I really didn’t appreciate the researchers who used soft numbers, simply looking at who was alive or dead who had registered for IVF between 1994 – 2005, because numbers don’t tell the real story.  In that pool of people, there were some who were infertile and treating their infertility, and there were others who had resolved their infertility and were living child-free, and to lump them together reinforces the myth that LCFAI is the same as being in the throes of infertility.  And when you reinforce that myth, you remove it as a possible solution from people’s minds.

After all, how many would choose to resolve their infertility by living child-free if they believed that they’d be in the emotional hell that is infertility indefinitely?  Not many.  But how many people would choose to reframe their life and choose living child-free if they believed they would be supported in that decision?  If the message was reinforced that LCFAI is different from treating infertility and these are the ways in which they differ.  I know I’ve internalized the ways they differ via a multitude of blog posts I’ve read (obviously enough that I can state that I see the two places in life as different), but it could be enormously helpful for people to state in a roundup of posts (since all personal experiences will be different) “this is how I felt during infertility and this is what it is like now after resolving infertility via LCFAI.”  How helpful would that be for people attempting to make the decision: to read, internalize, and understand?

Beyond those LCFAI, this concept of childless until proven parenting is incredibly dismissive — not to mention offensive — to all people who have lost a child, regardless of the gestational or birth age of said child.  Just because the child isn’t crawling through the physical world doesn’t mean that the child never existed, and it is a special kind of hell to be mourning someone that no one else got a chance to know.  There is no reminiscing, no shared memories, no new things to learn, no understanding from the general population. (Though, even that is fairly minimal.  Despite the fact that everyone will experience loved ones dying, humans are awful at comforting those who are grieving — especially long-term vs. short-term comfort.)  You are alone with that grief or sharing it with a very small circle of people.

But you can hardly be lumped in with all people who are not parenting who would like to parent.  Within those soft numbers, can they see who conceived but lost the pregnancy?  Those who conceived but their child was born still?  Who carried to term but experienced neonatal death?  I haven’t read the full study so I can’t know how much information the researchers had when coming to their conclusions.  But I can say that if they didn’t consider all those possibilities, they missed the nuances of the population they were studying.  And in missing those nuances, they did the population a disservice.

Good science is about pinpointing the specific not making sweeping generalizations.  Therefore I find the approach of childless until proven parenting confusing.  And by confusing I really mean disappointing with frustrations on the damage that studies like these do for bridging the gap between the infertile experience and the general population.  Whether you are surrounded by ghost children, amalgamations of Cycles Past and Cycles Future; viewing infertility as a temporary state you need to pass through to reach parenthood; living child-free after infertility; grieving a missing child; or at the beginning of a diagnosis, wondering which direction to walk, you know that there are many shades of infertility and the state each of us are in within this community.

And that’s why I can’t reduce us into two categories like the researchers did in that study.  It’s more complicated than are or aren’t; childless and with children.  There’s a much bigger story than the simplistic childless until proven parenting.