Niki Tehranchi

Have you ever wondered if, behind the cherubic face of your little angel, lurks the evil mind of Baby Stewie, of Family Guy fame?  I was thinking about that recently, due to a string of embarassing, public incidents instigated by Sweet Pea's potty mouth.  Well, in theory, he doesn't have a potty mouth.  It's just that he is at that age when he is having trouble pronouncing certain words.  And, well, they end up sounding like... Well, let me give you some examples.

 So we are in a busy playground.  Parents and toddlers running around.  A variety of cute, plastic animal sculptures for the kids to climb onto or under, like fish, giraffes, etc.  Suddenly, Sweet Pea stops dead in his tracks and in front of the assembly, starts shouting non-stop:

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck"

It was such a deer caught in the headlights moment for me, I tell you.  I felt the heat of shame from the roots of my hair down my face onto my whole body.  I just sat there unable to speak, unwilling to make eye contact with the other parents sitting next to me, witnessing this scene, knowing their eyes like lasers were aimed at me, shooting me with their silent "Bad Parent!" sting ray.

Finally, one of the moms dared to break the "Fuck" tirade, coming unexpectedly to my rescue like David confronting Goliath.

__"Oh how cute" she said tenderly "He is pointing at the "Frog"!

Frog/Frock/Fock/Fuck... Yes!!! That was the only reasonable explanation.  My little Sweet Pea was not a monster after all but simply having a bit of trouble differentiating between the letters K and G.  I honestly wanted to get up and kiss that woman who solved the clue as ingenuously as Dr. Robert Langdon deciphering a Masonic pyramid.

This was not an isolated incident.  Another day, I was picking him up from pre-school, which has a large Iranian-American contingent of kids and their moms.  Getting him in and out of the school is quite the ordeal to begin with, because he is going through a neurotic obsession with opening and closing the many numbers of doors that stand as obstacles between his classroom and the outside.  This does not fare well when there is a line forming at our back, waiting patiently for him to decide which of his fingers he wants to offer to the Gods of the Door Cracks.  So, on this particular day, I had a very proper Iranian mummy and her equally proper daughter behind me, all dressed up to the nines and impossibly put together like they should be on the cover of a Neiman Marcus catalogue.  Meanwhile, I am in my sweats, with a 6 months pregnant belly protruding and Sweet Pea's face covered with the morning's art project, seemingly consisting of green magic markers.  We looked more like the cover of Mad Magazine.  I was in a hurry to get out so I rushed him through the doors without letting him close it, whereupon he decided to have a full meltdown, throwing himself on the ground in front of the horrified Neiman Marcus mom and daughter duo, screaming out for all Iranian ears around:

"Coss! Coss! Coss! Coss!"

OMG!!!!!! WTF???????   Where did he come up with that?  That wasn't part of the Iranian vocabulary we had been working on.  I honestly wanted to die and be buried right then and there.  A few days later, as he was repeating this lovely tirade, this time at home, because i told him to stop slamming the kitchen cabinet doors shut, a light finally went on in my head.  He was simply trying to say "Close".  But because he has trouble with the "L" sound, it came out as...sigh...

The latest thing is that he has been studiously trying to display good manners in the form of saying "thank you."  He says thank you to pretty much everything now, from teacher wiping his nose, to me giving him his snack, to a kid sharing his toy.  Problem is, the sound "TH" becomes an "F" meaning that he ends up saying "Fank You".  Except that unfortunately, it comes out sound more like, you guess it, "Fuck You."  So he is basically walking around, telling everyone in his path to fuck off.

At this point, I am starting to wonder if this is just some big joke on his part and while he plays innocent, he really is enjoying every minute of the pure torture I have to endure when I get horrified looks from onlookers and I have to explain to them the whole process of how he really is meaning something else, while they all give me this pitying look like "yeah right, denial is not just a river in Africa."

I was commiserating with my friend, who wistfully replied:"Oh that's nothing!  My son loves screaming out "Dump Truck" whenever we pass a construction site. except that the combination of "P" and "T" somehow morphs into "F."  You can imagine how I must feel, when the notoriously potty-mouthed construction workers are the ones looking shocked and horrified by a two year old giddily pointing at them, shouting "Dumb Fuck" over and over." 

I guess I should be counting my lucky stars!